The importance of nucleon substructure in nuclear ground states

Using a potential model, constrained by the hadron spectrum, for the confinement of relativistic quarks we explore the consequences of the substructure of nucleons for the binding energy and ground state wavefunction of ⁴He. In its simplest form, this model gives a binding energy of 19 MeV. Quark wavefunctions differ from those associated with free nucleons by less than 10%, the rms quark radius is 1.34 fm and the resulting structure differs considerably from that of an expansion beginning from the (0s)⁴ shell model. Considerable contributions to the binding energy, attractive from quark delocalization and repulsive from the quark hyperfine interaction, appear unavoidable. We conclude that these effects cannot be excluded from a detailed understanding of the properties of nuclear ground states.