The Pion-Cloud Contribution to the Electromagnetic Nucleon Form Factors

Abstract

We study the electromagnetic structure of the nucleon within a hybrid constituent-quark model that comprises, in addition to the 3q valence component, also a 3q+π non-valence component. To this aim we employ a Poincaré-invariant multichannel formulation based on the point-form of relativistic quantum mechanics. With a simple 3-quark wave function for the bare nucleon, i.e. the 3q-component, we obtain reasonable results for the nucleon form factors and predict the meson-cloud contribution to be significant only below Q2 ≲ 0:5 GeV2 amounting to about 10% for Q2 → 0, in accordance with the findings of other authors.