Taming the pion cloud of the nucleon

We present a light-front determination of the pionic contribution to the nucleon self-energy, Σ(π), to second order in pion-baryon coupling constants that allows the pion-nucleon vertex function to be treated in a model-independent manner constrained by experiment. The pion mass μ dependence of Σ(π) is consistent with chiral perturbation theory results for small values of μ and is also linearly dependent on μ for larger values, in accord with the results of lattice QCD calculations. The derivative of Σ(π) with respect to μ(2) yields the dominant contribution to the pion content, which is consistent with the dover ˉ]-uover ˉ] difference observed experimentally in the violation of the Gottfried sum rule.