On Nucleon "Radii"

Abstract

We show that various nucleon "radii" that appear in the literature, e.g."charge", "gravitational", "mass" or "mechanical, do not have a direct geometric meaning and do not give an idea of the physical size of the nucleon. In the framework of the Gribov parton scheme we also show that at high enough energy a gluon cloud appears beyond the valence core of the nucleon and begins to determine the region of interaction of elastic nucleon-nucleon scattering and the growth of its cross-section.