Interpretation of recent form factor data in terms of an advanced representation of baryons in space and time

Abstract

Data on electromagnetic form factors of proton, neutron, and $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ from annihilation and scattering reactions are collected and interpreted in the frame of a generalized picture of the internal structure of baryons which holds in space-like and time-like regions. It is shown that these data give an insight into the spatial structure of the baryon for distances 100 times smaller than the baryon size and, in the time-like region, a vision of the time evolution of the hadronic matter for times up to ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}25}$ s, that is two orders of magnitude shorter than the time taken by the light to cross the volume of a proton. In the proposed interpretation, the electric form factor of the proton in the space-like region cannot cross zero, but vanishes or stays very small, as an extrapolation of the data seems to show. In the time-like region specific structures appearing in the data give evidence of the dominance of the quark-diquark underlying dynamics in a well-determined time interval during the evolution of the system.