Proton electromagnetic form factors: Basic notions, present achievements and future perspectives

The aim of this report is to give basic notions on electromagnetic hadron form factors (FFs), as they are understood at the present time, to summarize and analyze the present experimental results and available theoretical models and to open a view on future perspectives. FFs are fundamental quantities, which describe the internal, dynamical structure of hadrons. Although the theoretical formalism was settled in the middle of last century, as well as the first experiments in electron-proton elastic scattering for which R. Hofstadter got the Nobel prize in 1961, a renewed activity is due to recent, surprising results and to the opening of new experimental possibilities. An elegant formalism was built on the assumption of a hadron electromagnetic interaction based on the exchange of a virtual photon of four-momentum q(2). In this case FFs are analytic functions of only one variable, q(2), and the electromagnetic vertex gamma*hh (h is any hadron) is defined by two structure functions, which, in turn, are expressed in terms of (2S + 1) FFs, S being the hadron spin, assuming parity and time-invariance. Our aim is to anticipate the potentiality contained in the future data, combined with the present knowledge, to point out the relevant observables and the most significative measurements, and to give predictions to be compared to the data when they will be available. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.