Baryons are exponentially harder to simulate than mesons

Using BRST cohomology rather than supersymmetry, the authors classify quark operators in SU(Nc) QCD into two families — 'fortuitous' baryons and 'monotone' mesons — mirroring a known dichotomy in supersymmetric theories. In the Veneziano limit of large flavor and color numbers, the two classes diverge sharply: meson operators grow polynomially in count while baryon operators grow exponentially. Probing this with stabilizer Rényi entropy as a complexity proxy in a qubit toy model, mesons show only power-law classical simulation complexity, whereas typical baryons show super-exponential complexity — suggesting confinement hides genuinely hard quantum structure inside baryons.