Excited baryon structure using exclusive reactions with CLAS12

Abstract

Studying excited nucleon structure through exclusive electroproduction reactions is an important avenue for exploring the nature of the non-perturbative strong interaction. Electrocouplings for N* states in the mass range below 1.8 GeV have been determined from analyses of CLAS πN, ηN, and ππN data. This work made it clear that consistency of independent analyses of exclusive channels with different couplings and non-resonant backgrounds but the same N* electro-excitation amplitudes, is essential to have confidence in the extracted results. In terms of hadronic coupling, many high-lying N* states preferentially decay through the ππN channel instead of πN. Data from the KY channels will therefore be critical to provide an independent analysis with which to compare the extracted electrocouplings for the high-lying N* states against those determined from the πN and ππN channels. A program to study excited N* decays to non-strange and strange exclusive final states using CLAS12 will measure differential cross sections to be used as input to extract the γvNN* transition form factors for the most prominent N* states in the range of invariant energy W up 3 GeV in the virtually unexplored domain of momentum transfers Q2 up to 12 GeV2.