The pion-cloud contribution to the electromagnetic nucleon structure

Abstract

The present contribution continues and extends foregoing work on the calculation of electroweak form factors of hadrons using the point-form of relativistic quantum mechanics. Here we are particularly interested in studying pionic effects on the electromagnetic structure of the nucleon. To this aim we employ a hybrid constituent-quark model that comprises, in addition to the $3q$ valence component, also a $3q$+$\pi$ non-valence component. With a simple wave function for the $3q$ component we get reasonable results for the nucleon form factors. In accordance with other authors we find that the pionic effect is significant only below $Q^2\lesssim 0.5$~GeV$^2$.