Dispersion relations provide a powerful tool to analyse the electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon for all momentum transfers. Constraints from meson-nucleon scattering data, unitarity, and perturbative QCD can be included in a straightforward way. In particular, we include the 2pi, rho-pi, and KKbar continua as independent input in our analysis and provide an error band for our results. Moreover, we discuss two different methods to include the asymptotic constraints from perturbative QCD. We simultaneously analyze the world data for all four form factors in both the space-like and time-like regions and generally find good agreement with the data. We also extract the nucleon radii and the omega-NN coupling constants. For the radii, we generally find good agreement with other determinations with the exception of the electric charge radius of the proton which comes out smaller. The omega-NN vector coupling constant is determined relatively well by the fits, but for the tensor coupling constant even the sign can not be determined.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

We calculate the two-pion continuum contribution to the nucleon isovector spectral functions drawing upon the new high statistics measurements of the pion form factor by the CMD-2, KLOE, and SND collaborations. The general structure of the spectral functions remains unchanged, but the magnitude increases by about 10%. Using the updated spectral functions, we calculate the contribution of the two-pion continuum to the nucleon isovector form factors and radii. We compare the isovector radii with simple ρ-pole models and illustrate their strong underestimation in such approaches. Moreover, we give a convenient parametrization of the result for use in future form factor analyses.

We address the discrepancy between the Rosenbluth and polarization transfer data for the electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon. Assuming that the effect of two-photon corrections on the polarization transfer data is negligible, we obtain a model-independent estimate of the two-photon correction ∆ 2γ . We analyze the polarization transfer data and the cross section data separately using dispersion relations. A central value as well as an error estimate for ∆ 2γ is then obtained from a comparison of the two analyses. The resulting values for ∆ 2γ are in good agreement with direct calculations available in the literature.