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 $3q$+$\pi$ non-valence component. To this aim we employ a Poincar\'e-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 $Q^2\lesssim 0.5$\,GeV$^2$ amounting to about 10\% for $Q^2\rightarrow 0$, in accordance with the findings of other authors.