Strong interactions and electromagnetism in low-energy hadron physics

In the present work, we study various aspects of the entanglement of the strong and electromagnetic interactions as it is manifest in low-energy hadron physics. In the framework of chiral perturbation theory, two aspects are investigated: the test of the structure of baryons as probed by external electromagnetic currents, and the modification of reactions mediated by the strong interactions in the presence of internal (virtual) photons. In the first part of this work, we study the electromagnetic form factors of nucleons and the ground state baryon octet, as well as strangeness form factors of the nucleon. Emphasis is put on the comparison of a new relativistic scheme for the calculation of loop diagrams to the heavy-baryon formalism, and on the convergence of higher-order corrections in both schemes. The new scheme is shown to yield both a phenomenologically more successful description of the data and better convergence behaviour. In the second part, we study isospin violation in pion-kaon scattering as mediated by virtual photon effects and the light quark mass difference. This investigation is of particular importance for the extraction of scattering lengths from measurements of lifetime and energy levels in pion-kaon atoms. The isospin breaking corrections are shown to be small and sufficiently well under control. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RA 831(4007) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman