Excited Baryon Structure Using KY Exclusive Reactions With CLAS12

Studying excited nucleon structure via exclusive $KY$ electroproduction will be an important tool for exploring the non-perturbative strong interaction. Electrocouplings for low-lying $N^*$ states ($<$1.7 GeV) have been determined from analyses of CLAS $\pi N$ and $\pi \pi N$ data. This work made clear that consistency of independent analyses of exclusive channels with different couplings and non-resonant contributions is essential to have confidence in the extracted results. In terms of hadronic coupling, most high-lying $N^*$ states preferentially decay through the $\pi\pi N$ channel instead of $\pi N$. Data from the $KY$ channels will therefore be critical to provide an independent analysis to compare the extracted electrocouplings for the high-lying $N^*$ states against those determined from the $\pi\pi N$ channel from an already approved CLAS12 12-GeV experiment. A new experiment that will focus on $N^* \to KY$ decays using CLAS12 at JLab will be discussed that will measure differential cross sections to be used as input to extract the $\gamma_vNN^*$ transition form factors for the most prominent $N^*$ states in the range of invariant energy $W$ from 1.6 to 3~GeV in the virtually unexplored domain of momentum transfers $Q^2$ up to 12~GeV$^2$.