Threshold Neutral Pion Photoproduction on the Proton

The neutral pion photoproduction on the proton near threshold has a very small scattering cross section when compared to the charged channels, which in ChPT is explained by strong cancellations between the lowest order pieces. Therefore it is very sensitive to higher-order corrections of chiral perturbation theory. We perform a fully covariant calculation up to chiral order p^3 and we investigate the effect of the inclusion of the Delta(1232) resonance as an explicit degree of freedom. We show that the convergence improves, leading to a much better agreement with data at a wide range of energies.Comment: Proceedings to the NSTAR2015 conference, which will be published in JPS conference proceeding

Role of current quark mass dependent multi-quark interactions in low lying meson mass spectra

We call attention to a class of current-quark mass dependent multi-quark interaction terms which break explicitly the chiral $SU(3)_L\times SU(3)_R$ and $U_A(1)$ symmetries. They complete the set of effective quark interactions that contribute at the same order in $N_c$ as the 't Hooft flavor determinant interaction and the eight quark interactions in the phase of spontaneously broken chiral symmetry. The $N_c$ classification scheme matches the counting rules based on arguments set by the scale of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. Together with the leading in $N_c$ four quark Nambu-Jona-Lasinio Lagrangian and current quark mass matrix, the model is apt to account for the correct empirical ordering and magnitude of the splitting of states in the low lying mass spectra of spin zero mesons. The new terms turn out to be essential for the ordering $m_K < m_\eta$ in the pseudoscalar sector and $m_{\kappa_0} < m_{a_0}\sim m_{f0}$ for the scalars.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, prepared for the proceedings of the workshop "Excited QCD 2013", 03-09 February 2013 in Bjelasnica Mountain, Sarajevo, Bosni