Quasi-elastic knockout of pions and kaons from nucleons by high-energy electrons and quark microscopy of “soft” meson degrees of freedom in the nucleon Original Research Article

Electro-production of pions and kaons at the kinematics of quasi-elastic knockout (which is well known in the physics of atomic nucleus and corresponds to the t-pole diagram) is proposed for obtaining their momentum distribution (MD) in various channels of virtual decay N→B+π, B=N, Δ, N∗, N∗∗, and N→Y+K, Y=Λ, Σ. It is a powerful tool for investigation of a quark microscopic picture of the meson cloud in the nucleon. A model of scalar View the MathML source (View the MathML source) fluctuation in the non-trivial QCD vacuum is used to calculate pion and kaon momentum distributions (MD) in these channels.