Studies of the structure of excited baryons are key factors to the N* program at Jefferson Lab (JLab). Within the first year of data taking with the Hall B CLAS12 detector following the 12 GeV upgrade, a dedicated experiment will aim to extract the N* electrocouplings at high photon virtualities Q2. This experiment will allow exploration of the structure of N* resonances at the highest photon virtualities ever achieved, with a kinematic reach up to Q2 = 12 GeV 2. This high-Q2 reach will make it possible to probe the excited nucleon structures at distance scales ranging from where effective degrees of freedom, such as constituent quarks, are dominant through the transition to where nearly massless bare-quark degrees of freedom are relevant. In this document, we present a detailed description of the physics that can be addressed through N* structure studies in exclusive meson electroproduction. The discussion includes recent advances in reaction theory for extracting N* electrocouplings from meson electroproduction off protons, along with Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)-based approaches to the theoretical interpretation of these fundamental quantities. This program will afford access to the dynamics of the nonperturbative strong interaction responsible for resonance formation, and will be crucial in understanding the nature of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in baryons, and how excited nucleons emerge from QCD.

We describe a calculation of the spectrum of strange and nonstrange hadrons that simultaneously correlates the dressed-quark-core masses of meson and baryon ground-and excited-states within a single framework. The foundation for this analysis is a symmetry-preserving Dyson-Schwinger equation treatment of a vector×vector contact interaction. Our results exemplify and highlight the deep impact of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking on the hadron spectrum: an accurate description of the meson spectrum entails a similarly successful prediction of the spectrum of baryons, including those with strangeness. The analysis also provides numerous insights into baryon structure. For example, that baryon structure is largely flavour-blind, the first radial excitation of ground-state baryons is constituted almost entirely from axial-vector diquark correlations, and DCSB is the foundation for the ordering of low-lying baryon levels; viz., (1/2) + , (1/2) + , (1/2) − .