Exclusive reactions at high Q2 with CEBAF at higher energies

Our earliest and most successful understanding of meson and baryon structure has been based on a model of constituent quarks moving in a phenomenological mean field which is supposed to represent the effects of complicated, but as yet uncalculated, gluonic interactions. Refinements to such models in terms of residual interactions such as color hyperfine interactions improve agreement with experimental spectroscopy. As momentum transfers increase this type of simple model becomes inadequate and one must search for additional degrees of freedom to account for the observed data. However, since these models are not fundamental, the pursuit to apply it to regions of ever increasing momentum transfer becomes fruitless. The constituent quarks themselves are the manifestations of a complexity of interacting valence quarks, sea quarks and gluons in the non-perturbative domain, and it is in terms of these fundamental entities which one must learn to describe mesons and baryons. The situation is analogous to that of the nucleus. A great deal of theoretical effort has gone into models involving constituent protons and neutrons, with interactions modeled in terms of meson fields. Thus, many of the low energy properties of nuclear matter are well described in terms of a mean field shell model, with residual perturbative nucleon-nucleon interactions. However, with increasing momentum transfer (resolution) the model becomes more complicated and eventually, as in the case of the baryon, less useful. A more fundamental approach requires the description of nuclear matter in terms of the variables of QCD in the non-perturbative domain. The fact that this may prove to be a very difficult task does not in any way diminish its importance