Quasi-elastic knockout of pions and kaons from nucleons by high-energy electrons and quark microscopy of "soft" meson degrees of freedom in the nucleon

Abstract

Electro-production of pions and kaons at the kinematics of quasi-elastic knockout (which is well known in the physics of atomic nucleus and corresponds to the $t$-pole diagram) is proposed for obtaining their momentum distribution (MD) in various channels of virtual decay $N\to B+\pi$, $B=N$, $\Delta$, $N^{\ast }$, $N^{\ast \ast }$, and $N\to Y+K$, $Y=\Lambda$, $\Sigma$. It is a powerful tool for investigation of a quark microscopic picture of the meson cloud in the nucleon. A model of scalar $q\bar{q}$ (${}^3{P}_0$) fluctuation in the non-trivial QCD vacuum is used to calculate pion and kaon momentum distributions (MD) in these channels.

31 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Nucl.Phys.A