Meson-cloud effects in the electromagnetic nucleon structure

Abstract: We study how the electromagnetic structure of the nucleon is influenced by a pion cloud. To this aim we make use of a constituent-quark model with instantaneous confinement and a pion that couples directly to the quarks. To derive the invariant 1- photon-exchange electron-nucleon scattering amplitude we employ a Poincar\'e- invariant coupled-channel formulation which is based on the point-form of relativistic quantum mechanics. We argue that the electromagnetic nucleon current extracted from this amplitude can be reexpressed in terms of pure hadronic degrees of freedom with the quark substructure of the pion and the nucleon being encoded in electromagnetic and strong vertex form factors. These are form factors of bare particles, i.e. eigenstates of the pure confinement problem. First numerical results for (bare) photon-nucleon and pion-nucleon form factors, which are the basic ingredients of the further calculation, are given for a simple 3-quark wave function of the nucleon.