A quark model framework for the study of nuclear medium effects

Abstract

A quark-model framework for studying nuclear medium effects on nucleon resonances is described and applied here to pion photoproduction on the deuteron which is the simplest composite nucleon system and serves as a first test case. Pion photoproduction on nuclei is discussed within a chiral constituent quark model in which the quark degrees of freedom are explicitly introduced through an effective chiral Lagrangian for the quark–pseudoscalar meson coupling. The advantage of this model is that a complete set of nucleon resonances can be systematically included with a limited number of parameters. Also, the systematic description of the nucleon and its resonances at quark level allows us to self-consistently relate the nuclear medium's influence on the baryon properties to the intrinsic dynamic aspects of the baryons. As the simplest composite nucleus, the deuteron represents the first application of this effective theory for meson photoproduction on light nuclei. The influence of the medium on the transition operators for a free nucleon is investigated in the delta resonance region. No evidence is found for a change of the delta properties in the pion photoproduction reaction on the deuteron since the nuclear medium here involves just one other nucleon and the low binding energy implies low nuclear density. However, we show that the reaction mechanism is in principle sensitive to changes of delta properties that would be produced by the denser nuclear medium of heavier nuclei through the modification of the quark-model parameters.