Paper detail

Light-Baryon Spectroscopy and the Electromagnetic Form Factors in the Quark Model

The momentum distributions of the constituent quarks inside the nucleon and the prominent electroproduced nucleon resonances are investigated in the two most sophisticated, available quark potential models, based respectively on the assumption of the valence + gluon dominance and on the exchange of the pseudoscalar Goldstone-bosons arising from the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. It is shown that both models predict a large, similar content of high-momentum components, due to the short-range part of the interquark interaction, which affect the behaviour of both elastic and transition electromagnetic form factors at large values of the momentum transfer. The electromagnetic form factors are calculated within a relativistic approach formulated on the light-front, adopting a one-body current with constituent quark form factors. The results suggest that soft, non-perturbative effects can play a relevant role for explaining the existing data on elastic as well as transition form factors (at least) for Q**2 ~ 10 - 20 (GeV/c)**2.