Comment on ``Relativistic cluster dynamics of nucleons and mesons. II. Formalism and examples''

In a recent paper [Phys.\ Rev.\ C{\bf 49}, 2142 (1994)], Haberzettl presented cluster N-body equations for arbitrarily large systems of nucleons and mesons. Application to the three-nucleon system is claimed to yield a new kind of three-nucleon force. We demonstrate that these three-nucleon equations contain double counting.Comment: 6 pages in Revtex 3.0, 6 Postscript figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Dressing the electromagnetic nucleon current

A field-theory-based approach to pion photoproduction off the nucleon is used to derive a microscopically consistent formulation of the fully dressed electromagnetic nucleon current in an effective Lagrangian formalism. It is shown how the rigorous implementation of local gauge invariance at all levels of the reaction dynamics provides equations that lend themselves to practically manageable truncations of the underlying nonlinearities of the problem. The requirement of consistency also suggests a novel way of treating the pion photoproduction problem. Guided by a phenomenological implementation of gauge invariance for the truncated equations that has proved successful for pion photoproduction, an expression for the fully dressed nucleon current is given that satisfies the Ward-Takahashi identity for a fully dressed nucleon propagator as a matter of course. Possible applications include meson photo- and electroproduction processes, bremsstrahlung, Compton scattering, and $ee'$ processes off nucleons.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Analyzing eta' photoproduction data on the proton at energies of 1.5--2.3 GeV

The recent high-precision data for the reaction $\gamma p\to p\eta'$ at photon energies in the range 1.5--2.3 GeV obtained by the CLAS collaboration at the Jefferson Laboratory have been analyzed within an extended version of the photoproduction model developed previously by the authors based on a relativistic meson-exchange model of hadronic interactions [Phys. Rev. C \textbf{69}, 065212 (2004)]. The $\eta'$ photoproduction can be described quite well over the entire energy range of available data by considering $S_{11}$, $P_{11}$, $P_{13}$, and $D_{13}$ resonances, in addition to the $t$-channel mesonic currents. The observed angular distribution is due to the interference between the $t$-channel and the nucleon $s$- and $u$-channel resonance contributions. The $j=3/2$ resonances are required to reproduce some of the details of the measured angular distribution. For the resonances considered, our analysis yields mass values compatible with those advocated by the Particle Data Group. We emphasize, however, that cross-section data alone are unable to pin down the resonance parameters and it is shown that the beam and/or target asymmetries impose more stringent constraints on these parameter values. It is found that the nucleonic current is relatively small and that the $NN\eta^\prime$ coupling constant is not expected to be much larger than 2.Comment: Revised version based on revised (finalized) CLAS data (14 pages, 10 figures, RevTeX4

Preserving the gauge invariance of meson production currents in the presence of explicit final-state interactions

A comprehensive formalism is developed to preserve the gauge invariance of currents describing the photo- or electroproduction of mesons off the nucleon when the final-state interactions of mesons and nucleons is taken into account explicitly. Replacing exchange currents by auxiliary currents, it is found that all contributions due to explicit final-state interactions are purely transverse and do not contain a Kroll-Ruderman-type contact current. The relation of the present formulation to tree-level-type prescriptions is shown.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; published versio