Possible evidence of extended objects inside the proton

Abstract

Recent data on the Nachtmann moments of the unpolarized proton structure function F2p, obtained at low momentum transfer with the CLAS detector at Jefferson Lab, are interpreted in terms of the dominance of the elastic coupling of the virtual photon with extended substructures inside the proton. The CLAS data exhibit a new type of scaling behavior and the resulting scaling function can be interpreted as a constituent form factor consistent with the elastic nucleon data. A constituent size of ~ 0.2 - 0.3 fm is obtained.