Testing chiral unitary models for the $\Lambda(1405)$ in $K^{+}\pi\Sigma$ photoproduction

Abstract

We adopt a novel formalism for the low-energy analysis of the $\gamma p \to K^{+}\pi\Sigma$ photoproduction reaction to calculate the $\pi\Sigma$ invariant mass distributions in the $\Lambda(1405)$ resonance region. The approach adheres to constraints arising from unitarity, gauge invariance and chiral perturbation theory, and is used without adjusting any model parameters. It is found that the meson-baryon rescattering in the final state has a major impact on the magnitude and structure of the generated spectra that are compared with the experimental data from the CLAS collaboration. We demonstrate a large sensitivity of the theoretical predictions to the choice of the coupled-channel $\pi\Sigma - \bar{K}N$ model amplitudes which should enable one to constrain the parameter space of these models.