Abstract. Diquark correlations play an important role in hadron physics. The properties of diquarks can be obtained from the corresponding bound state equation. Using a model for the effective quark-quark interaction that has proved successful in the light meson sector, we solve the scalar diquark Bethe-Salpeter equations and use the obtained Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes to compute the diquarks' electromagnetic form factors. The scalar ud diquark charge radius is about 8% larger than the pion charge radius, indicating that these diquarks are somewhat larger in size than the corresponding mesons. We also provide analytic fits for the form factor over a moderate range in Q 2 , which may be useful, for example, in building quark-diquark models of nucleons.
DiquarksDiquarks are coloured states of two quarks. Due to their colour charge, they are expected to be confined, and cannot be observed directly. Despite being confined, they can play a role in the dynamics of baryons: two quarks in a colour anti-triplet configuration can couple with a third quark to form a colour singlet baryon. Indeed quark-diquark models have been used quite successfully in various models for baryons [1,2,3]. More recently, they also have been suggested as the constituents of pentaquarks: one could imagine a pentaquark as a bound state of two diquarks and an antiquark [4], or as a bound state of a diquark and a triquark [5].For calculations of the baryon spectrum within a quark-diquark model, the most important property of the diquarks is their mass. There are a number of different calculations of these masses available, both from lattice QCD [6] and using the set of Dyson-Schwinger equations [DSEs] [7,8,9]. These calculations seem to agree with each other to within about 20%. For calculations of electromagnetic properties of nucleons (and other baryons), one also needs to know how photons couple to diquarks. Since they are not observable, we cannot obtain *