Electromagnetic interactions of extended nucleons

Abstract

An electromagnetic current operator is deduced from the most general form of the extended pion-nucleon vertex function using the minimal substitution prescription. It is proved that the sum of the obtained current operator and the isolated-pole contribution satisfies the Ward-Takahashi identity derived for the pion photoproduction. The minimal-coupling interaction is applied to the calculation of the one-pion exchange current regularized by the pion-nucleon form factors. It is found that the one-pion exchange current operator including hadronic and electromagnetic form factors satisfies the Ward-Takahashi equation for the nucleon-nucleon interaction.