Upper Energy Limit of Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory in Neutral Pion Photoproduction

With the availability of the new neutral pion photoproduction from the proton data from the A2 and CB-TAPS Collaborations at Mainz it is mandatory to revisit Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory (HBChPT) and address the extraction of the partial waves as well as other issues such as the value of the low-energy constants, the energy range where the calculation provides a good agreement with the data and the impact of unitarity. We find that, within the current experimental status, HBChPT with the fitted LECs gives a good agreement with the existing neutral pion photoproduction data up to $\sim$170 MeV and that imposing unitarity does not improve this picture. Above this energy the data call for further improvement in the theory such as the explicit inclusion of the \Delta (1232). We also find that data and multipoles can be well described up to $\sim$185 MeV with Taylor expansions in the partial waves up to first order in pion energy.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, version to be published in Physics Letters

Amplitude analysis and the nature of the Zc(3900)

The microscopic nature of the XYZ states remains an unsettled topic. We show how a thorough amplitude analysis of the data can help constraining models of these states. Specifically, we consider the case of the Zc(3900) peak and discuss possible scenarios of a QCD state, virtual state, or a kinematical enhancement. We conclude that current data are not precise enough to distinguish between these hypotheses, however, the method we propose, when applied to the forthcoming high-statistics measurements should shed light on the nature of these exotic enhancements.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables. Version accepted for publication on Phys.Lett.

Exclusive tensor meson photoproduction

We study tensor meson photoproduction outside of the resonance region, at beam energies of few GeVs. We build a model based on Regge theory that includes the leading vector and axial exchanges. We consider two determinations of the unknown helicity couplings, and fit to the recent a2 photoproduction data from CLAS. Both choices give a similar description of the a2 cross section, but result in different predictions for the parity asymmetries and the f2 photoproduction cross section. We conclude that new measurements of f2 photoproduction in the forward region are needed to pin down the correct production mechanism. We also extend our predictions to the 8.5 GeV beam energy, where current experiments are running.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Version accepted for publication on Phys.Rev.

Analysis of the quadrupole deformation of Δ\Delta(1232) within an effective Lagrangian model for pion photoproduction from the nucleon

We present an extraction of the E2/M1 ratio of the $\Delta$(1232) from experimental data applying an effective Lagrangian model. We compare the result obtained with different nucleonic models and we reconcile the experimental results with the Lattice QCD calculations

Structure of Pion Photoproduction Amplitudes

We derive and apply the finite energy sum rules to pion photoproduction. We evaluate the low energy part of the sum rules using several state-of-the-art models. We show how the differences in the low energy side of the sum rules might originate from different quantum number assignments of baryon resonances. We interpret the observed features in the low energy side of the sum rules with the expectation from Regge theory. Finally, we present a model, in terms of a Regge-pole expansion, that matches the sum rules and the high-energy observables.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures and 4 table