Hadronic Decays of Baryons in Point-form Relativistic Quantum Mechanics

We discuss strong decays of baryon resonances within the concept of relativistic constituent quark models. In particular, we follow a Poincaré-invariant approach along the point form of relativistic quantum mechanics. Here, we focus on pionic decay modes of N and ∆ resonances. It is found that the covariant quark-model predictions calculated in the point-form spectator model in general underestimate the experimental data considerably. This points to a systematic defect in the used decay operator and/or the baryon wave functions. From a detailed investigation of the point-form decay operator it is seen that the requirement of translational invariance implies effective many-body contributions. Furthermore, one has to employ a normalization factor in the definition of the decay operator in the pointform spectator model. Our analysis suggests that this normalization factor is best chosen consistently with the one used for the electromagnetic and axial current operators for elastic nucleon form factors.