  A Rota-Baxter algebra, also known as a Baxter algebra, is an algebra with a
linear operator satisfying a relation, called the Rota-Baxter relation, that
generalizes the integration by parts formula. Most of the studies on
Rota-Baxter algebras have been for commutative algebras. Two constructions of
free commutative Rota-Baxter algebras were obtained by Rota and Cartier in the
1970s and a third one by Keigher and one of the authors in the 1990s in terms
of mixable shuffles. Recently, noncommutative Rota-Baxter algebras have
appeared both in physics in connection with the work of Connes and Kreimer on
renormalization in perturbative quantum field theory, and in mathematics
related to the work of Loday and Ronco on dendriform dialgebras and
trialgebras.
  This paper uses rooted trees and forests to give explicit constructions of
free noncommutative Rota--Baxter algebras on modules and sets. This highlights
the combinatorial nature of Rota--Baxter algebras and facilitates their further
study. As an application, we obtain the unitarization of Rota-Baxter algebras.
