Parity violation with electrons and hadrons

A key question in understanding the structure of nucleons involves the role of sea quarks in their ground state electromagnetic properties such as charge and magnetism. Parity-violating electron scattering, when combined with determination of nucleon electromagnetic form factors from parity-conserving e-N scattering, provides another degree of freedom to separately determine the up, down and strange quark contributions to nucleon electromagnetic structure. Strange quarks are unique in that they are exclusively in the nucleon's sea. A program of experiments using parity violating electron scattering has been underway for approximately a decade, and results are beginning to emerge. This paper is a brief overview of the various experiments and their results to date along with a short-term outlook of what can be anticipated from experiments in the next few years. © 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.