We discuss recent results from CLAS on electromagnetic resonance transition amplitudes and their dependence on the distance scale ($Q^2$). From the comparison of these results with most advanced theoretical calculations within QCD-based approaches th
ere is clear evidence that meson-baryon contributions are present and important at large distances, i.e. small $Q^2$, and that quark core contributions dominate the short distance behavior.
Studies of the structure of excited baryons are key to the N* program at Jefferson Lab. Within the first year of data taking with the Hall B CLAS12 detector following the 12 GeV upgrade, a dedicated experiment will aim to extract the N* electrocoupli
ngs at high photon virtualities Q2. This experiment will allow exploration of the structure of N* resonances at the highest photon virtualities ever yet achieved, with a kinematic reach up to Q2 = 12 GeV2. This high-Q2 reach will make it possible to probe the excited nucleon structures at distance scales ranging from where effective degrees of freedom, such as constituent quarks, are dominant through the transition to where nearly massless bare-quark degrees of freedom are relevant. In this document, we present a detailed description of the physics that can be addressed through N* structure studies in exclusive meson electroproduction. The discussion includes recent advances in reaction theory for extracting N* electrocouplings from meson electroproduction off protons, along with QCD-based approaches to the theoretical interpretation of these fundamental quantities. This program will afford access to the dynamics of the non-perturbative strong interaction responsible for resonance formation, and will be crucial in understanding the nature of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in baryons, and how excited nucleons emerge from QCD.
We report the measurement of near threshold neutral pion electroproduction cross sections and the extraction of the associated structure functions on the proton in the kinematic range $Q^2$ from 2 to 4.5 GeV$^2$ and $W$ from 1.08 to 1.16 GeV. These m
easurements allow us to access the dominant pion-nucleon s-wave multipoles $E_{0+}$ and $S_{0+}$ in the near-threshold region. In the light-cone sum-rule framework (LCSR), these multipoles are related to the generalized form factors $G_1^{pi^0 p}(Q^2)$ and $G_2^{pi^0 p}(Q^2)$. The data are compared to these generalized form factors and the results for $G_1^{pi^0 p}(Q^2)$ are found to be in good agreement with the LCSR predictions, but the level of agreement with $G_2^{pi^0 p}(Q^2)$ is poor.
