Theory Support for the Excited Baryon Program at the Jlab 12 GeV Upgrade

This document outlines major directions in theoretical support for the measurement of nucleon resonance transition form factors at the JLab 12 GeV upgrade with the CLAS12 detector. Using single and double meson production, prominent resonances in the mass range up to 2 GeV will be studied in the range of photon virtuality $Q^2$ up to 12 GeV$^2$ where quark degrees of freedom are expected to dominate. High level theoretical analysis of these data will open up opportunities to understand how the interactions of dressed quarks create the ground and excited nucleon states and how these interactions emerge from QCD. The paper reviews the current status and the prospects of QCD based model approaches that relate phenomenological information on transition form factors to the non-perturbative strong interaction mechanisms, that are responsible for resonance formation.