Photo- and Electrocouplings of Nucleon Resonances

Abstract

Advances in the exploration of the spectrum and structure of the excited states of the nucleon from experiments with electromagnetic probes on proton targets are presented. Impressive progress has been achieved in the studies of exclusive meson photoproduction in experiments with continuous electron beams and with detectors of almost $$4\pi $$ acceptance. The high-quality data, coupled with the advances in the amplitude analyses of exclusive photo- and hadroproduction data, allow for the observation of several long-awaited new baryon states known previously as the “missing” resonances. Studies of exclusive meson electroproduction in the resonance region with the CLAS detector at JLab have provided the dominant part of the available world information on exclusive meson electroproduction observables. These data offer unique information on the structure of most well-established excited nucleon states in the mass region up to 1.8 GeV in terms of the evolution of their electroexcitation amplitudes with momentum transfer of the virtual photon. We discuss the impact of these results on the insight into the strong interaction dynamics that underlie the generation of the full spectrum of nucleon resonances of distinctively different structure. These results shed light on the emergence of hadron mass, which is one of the most important and still open problems in the Standard Model. The extension of the nucleon resonance studies in the experiments of the 12-GeV era at JLab with the CLAS12 detector are outlined.