N* Experiments and their Impact on Strong QCD Physics

Abstract

I give a brief overview of experimental studies of the spectrum and the structure of the excited states of the nucleon and what we learn about their internal structure. The focus is on the effort to obtain a more complete picture of the light-quark baryon excitation spectrum employing electromagnetic beams, and on the study of the transition form factors and helicity amplitudes and their dependence on the magnitude of the photon virtuality $Q^2$, especially for some of the most prominent resonances. The results were obtained in pion and eta electroproduction experiments off proton targets. They strengthen the connection of experiment and new results from modeling sQCD in DSE and Light Cone SR approaches. They also point to the nature of these states as 3-quark excitations at the core.