Constituent quarks as solitons

We exhibit soliton solutions of QCD in two dimensions that have the quantum numbers of quarks. They exist only for quarks heavier than the dimensional gauge coupling, and have infinite energy, corresponding to the presence of a string carrying the non-singlet color flux off to spatial infinity. The quark solitons also disappear at finite temperature, as the temperature-dependent effective quark mass is reduced in the approach to the quark/hadron phase transition.