Nuclear Physics Seminars

The bare mass of the three valance quarks only makes up ~ 1% of the proton mass, the rest is a sea of gluons, quarks and anti-quarks, which is dominated by the up, down and strange quarks. From the quark model, one might naively expect that the electromagnetic form factors are determined only by the valence quarks, with no contribution from the strange sea quarks. But, existing data suggesting a non-zero strange quark contribution to these form factors at high Q² has been a topic of great interest. A new measurement of the strange quark vector form factors by the HAPPEX III collaboration is discussed.