Chiral analysis of baryon form factors

This work presents an extensive theoretical investigation of the structure of the nucleon within the standard model of elementary particle physics. In particular, the long range contributions to a number of various form factors parametrizing the interactions of the nucleon with an electromagnetic probe are calculated. The theoretical framework for those calculations is chiral perturbation theory, the exact low energy limit of Quantum Chromo Dynamics, which describes such long range contributions in terms of a pion-cloud. In this theory, a nonrelativistic leading one loop order calculation of the form factors parametrizing the vector transition of a nucleon to its lowest lying resonance, the Δ, a covariant calculation of the isovector and isoscalar vector form factors of the nucleon at next to leading one loop order and a covariant calculation of the isoscalar and isovector generalized vector form factors of the nucleon at leading one loop order are performed. In order to perform consistent loop calculations in the covariant formulation of chiral perturbation theory an appropriate renormalization scheme is defined in this work. All theoretical predictions are compared to phenomenology and results from lattice QCD simulations. These comparisons allow for a determination of the low energy constants of the theory. Furthermore, the possibility of chiral extrapolation, i.e. the extrapolation of lattice data from simulations at large pion masses down to the small physical pion mass is studied in detail. Statistical as well as systematic uncertainties are estimated for all results throughout this work. (orig.)