The nucleon wave function in light-front dynamics

Abstract

The general spin structure of the relativistic nucleon wave function in the $3q$-model is found. It contains 16 spin components, in contrast to 8 ones known previously, since in a many-body system the parity conservation does not reduce the number of the components. The explicitly covariant form of the wave function automatically takes into account the relativistic spin rotations, without introducing any Melosh rotation matrices. It also reduces the calculations to the standard routine of the Dirac matrices and of the trace techniques. In examples of the proton magnetic moment and of the axial nucleon form factor, with a particular wave function, we reproduce the results of the standard approach. Calculations beyond the standard assumptions give different results.