Electromagnetic properties of light and heavy baryons in the relativistic quark model

One of the main challenges of nowadays low-energy physics remains the description of the internal structure of hadrons, strongly connected to the electromagnetic properties of matter. In this vein, the success of the relativistic quark model in the analysis of the hadron structure constitutes a solid motivation for the study carried out throughout this work. The relativistic quark model is extended to the investigation of static electromagnetic properties of both heavy and light baryons. The bare contributions to the magnetic moments of the single-, double- and triple-heavy baryons are calculated. Moreover, the relativistic quark model allows the study of the electromagnetic properties of the light baryon octet incorporating meson cloud contributions in a perturbative manner. The long disputed values of the multipole ratios E2/M1 and C2/M1 and the electromagnetic form factors of the N→Δγ transition are successfully reproduced. The relativistic quark model can be viewed as a quantum field theory approach based on a phenomenological Lagrangian coupling light and heavy baryons to their constituent quarks. In our approach the baryon is a composite object of three constituent quarks, at least in leading order. The effective interaction Lagrangian is written in terms of baryon and constituent quark fields. The effective action preserves Lorentz covariance and gauge invariance. The main ingredients of the model are already introduced at the level of the interaction Lagrangian: the three-quark baryon currents, the Gaussian distribution of the constituent quarks inside the baryon and the compositeness condition which sets an upper limit for the baryon-quark vertex. The S-matrix elements are expressed by a set of Feynman quark-diagrams. The model contains only few parameters, namely, the cut-off parameter of the Gaussian quark distribution and the free quark propagator, which are unambiguously determined from the best fit to the data. The heavy quark limit within this model reveals an exact agreement in leading order with the model-independent predictions for the magnetic moments of the heavy baryons. For the light sector, a Lorentz covariant chiral quark Lagrangian is used to dress the constituent quarks by pseudoscalar meson clouds. The main achievement consists in the factorization of the valence quark contributions and the meson cloud contributions in the calculation of electromagnetic properties of light baryons. (orig.)