Free-electron lasers (FELs) are promising devices for generating light with laser-like properties in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray spectral regions. Recently, FELs based on the self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) mechanism have allowed major breakthroughs in diffraction and spectroscopy applications, despite the relatively large shot-to-shot intensity and photon-energy fluctuations and the limited longitudinal coherence inherent in the SASE mechanism. Here, we report results on the initial performance of the FERMI seeded FEL, based on the high-gain harmonic generation configuration, in which an external laser is used to initiate the emission process. Emission from the FERMI FEL-1 source occurs in the form of pulses carrying energy of several tens of microjoules per pulse and tunable throughout the 65 to 20 nm wavelength range, with unprecedented shot-to-shot wavelength stability, low-intensity fluctuations, close to transform-limited bandwidth, transverse and longitudinal coherence and full control of polarization

Abstract. The unitary isobar model MAID has been extended and used for a partial wave analysis of pion photo-and electroproduction in the resonance region W < 2 GeV. Older data from the world data base and more recent experimental results from Mainz, Bates, Bonn and JLab for Q 2 up to 4.0 (GeV/c) 2 have been analyzed and the Q 2 dependence of the helicity amplitudes have been extracted for a series of four star resonances. We compare single-Q 2 analyses with a superglobal fit in a new parametrization of Maid2003 together with predictions of the hypercentral constituent quark model. As a result we find that the helicity amplitudes and transition form factors of constituent quark models should be compared with the analysis of bare resonances, where the pion cloud contributions have been subtracted.

The description of the electromagnetic properties of baryons with explicit reference to the quark degrees of freedom is reviewed. After a short discussion of the available phenomenological information, such as magnetic moments, form factors and photnexcitation amplitudes, the constituent quark model in the potential approach is introduced and the consequent description of the baryon spectrum is briefly discussed. The model is then systematically used as a theoretical framework for the interpretation of the experimental baryon data, including photon-proton scattering and pion photoproduction, and for the discussion of recent studies of the electromagnetic properties of few-nucleon systems. In particular, the reformulation of meson exchange currents in terms of quark degrees of freedom is reported and the results of various quark approaches to the form factors are presented. Finally, some recent improvements and future developments are briefly discussed.

The constituent quark model based on a hypercentral approach takes into account three-body force effects and standard two-body potential contributions. The quark potential contains a hypercentral interaction, to which a hyperfine term is added. While the hypercentral potential supplies good values for the centroid energies of the resonance multiplets and a realistic set of quark wave functions, the hyperfine splittings are sometimes not sufficient to account for the observed masses. In this work we have introduced an improved form of the hyperfine interaction and an isospin dependent quark potential. The resulting description of the baryon spectrum is very good, also for the Roper resonance, specially thanks to the flavour dependent interaction.

No abstract