The quark-photon vertex and meson electromagnetic form factors

The ladder Bethe-Salpeter solution for the dressed photon-quark vertex is u sed to study the low-momentum behavior of the pion electromagnetic and the gamma*pi(0)gamma transition form factors. With model parameters previously fixed by light meson masses and decay constants, the low-momentum slope of both form factors is in excellent agreement with the data. In comparison, t he often-used Ball-Chiu Ansatz for the vertex is found to be deficient; les s than half of the obtained r(pi)(2) is generated by that Ansatz while the remainder of the charge radius could be attributed to the tail of the rho r esonance.