Speaker
Description
Gravitational form factors parametrize the energy-momentum tensor of composite systems, and characterize the density and flow of energy and momentum in these systems. This past decade has seen a blossoming of interest in and diversity of views on spatial distributions of mechanical properties, especially following recent empirical extractions of gravitational form factors at Jefferson Lab. A salient question in these discussions is whether momentum flux densities, and the D-term in particular, furnish distributions of stresses (such as pressure and shear forces). In this talk I will explain the basic formalism relating form factors to spatial densities and the energy-momentum tensor to stresses, summarize the views that exist in the literature, and conclude with a new perspective that emphasizes the importance of the cbar form factor in characterizing forces inside hadrons.
