Crossing symmetric potential model of pion-nucleon scattering

Abstract

A crossing symmetric $\pi N$ scattering amplitude is constructed through a complete attachment of two external pions to the dressed nucleon propagator of an underlying $\pi N$ potential model. Our formulation automatically provides expressions also for the crossing symmetric and gauge invariant pion photoproduction and Compton scattering amplitudes. We show that our amplitudes are unitary if they coincide on-shell with the amplitudes obtained by attaching one pion to the dressed $\pi NN$ vertex of the same potential model.