Aspects of near threshold neutral pion photoproduction off protons

Abstract

We investigate near threshold neutral pion photoproduction off protons to fourth order in heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory in the light of the new data from MAMI. We show that the unitarity cusp at the secondary \pi^+ n threshold is in agreement with expectations from the final state theorem. We also analyze the fourth order corrections to the P-wave low-energy theorems and show that potentially large Delta-isobar contributions are cancelled by sizeable pion loop effects. This solidifies the parameter free third order predictions, which are in excellent agreement with the data.