On the pion cloud of the nucleon

We evaluate the two--pion contribution to the nucleon electromagnetic form factors by use of dispersion analysis and chiral perturbation theory. After subtraction of the rho--meson component, we calculate the distributions of charge and magnetization in coordinate space, which can be interpreted as the effects of the pion cloud. We find that the charge distribution of this pion cloud effect peaks at distances of about 0.3 fm. Furthermore, we calculate the contribution of the pion cloud to the isovector charges and radii of the nucleon.Comment: 7 pages, latex, 3 ps figures, minor change

Novel evaluation of the two-pion contribution to the nucleon isovector form factors

We calculate the two-pion continuum contribution to the nucleon isovector spectral functions drawing upon the new high statistics measurements of the pion form factor by the CMD-2, KLOE, and SND collaborations. The general structure of the spectral functions remains unchanged, but the magnitude increases by about 10%. Using the updated spectral functions, we calculate the contribution of the two-pion continuum to the nucleon isovector form factors and radii. We compare the isovector radii with simple rho-pole models and illustrate their strong underestimation in such approaches. Moreover, we give a convenient parametrization of the result for use in future form factor analyses.Comment: 9 pages, 2 eps figures, revtex4, CMD-2 and SND data included, conclusions unchanged, version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Nucleon Form Factors in Dispersion Theory

Dispersion relations provide a powerful tool to analyse the electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon both in the space-like and time-like regions with constraints from other experiments, unitarity, and perturbative QCD. We give a brief introduction into dispersion theory for nucleon form factors and present first results from our ongoing form factor analysis. We also calculate the two-pion continuum contribution to the isovector spectral functions drawing upon the new high statistics measurements of the pion form factor by the CMD-2, KLOE, and SND collaborations.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, invited talk at the Symposium "20 Years of Physics at the Mainz Microtron MAMI", October 20-22, 2005, Mainz, German