D-state effects in the electromagnetic N-Delta transition

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of D-state components in the Delta baryon within a covariant quark model, highlighting the necessity of pion cloud effects to accurately describe electromagnetic transition form factors.

Contribution

It introduces a covariant definition of D-state components in the Delta wave function and quantifies their small but non-negligible contributions to transition form factors.

Findings

D-state components alone cannot explain the data.

Pion cloud contributions dominate the E2 and C2 form factors.

D-state contributions are estimated to be around 1-4% of the total.

Abstract

We consider here a manifestly covariant quark model of the nucleon and the Delta, where one quark is off-shell and the other two quarks form an on-shell diquark pair. Using this model, we have shown previously that the nucleon form factors and the dominant form factor for the gamma N -> Delta transition (the magnetic dipole (M1) form factor) can be well described by nucleon and Delta wave functions with S-state components only. In this paper we show that non-vanishing results for the small electric (E2) and Coulomb (C2) quadrupole form factors can be obtained if D-state components are added to the Delta valence quark wave function. We present a covariant definition of these components and compute their contributions to the form factors. We find that these components cannot, by themselves, describe the data. Explicit pion cloud contributions must also be added and these contributions dominate both the E2 and the C2 form factors. By parametrizing the pion cloud contribution for the transition electric and Coulomb form factors in terms of the neutron electric form factor, we estimate that the contributions of the Delta D-state coupled to quark core spin of 3/2 is of the order of 1%, and the contributions of the Delta D-state coupled to quark core spin 1/2 is of the order of 4%.