The Rarita--Schwinger field: renormalization and phenomenology

Abstract

We discuss renormalization of propagator of interacting Rarita--Schwinger field. Spin-3/2 contribution after renormalization takes usual resonance form. For non-leading spin-1/2 terms we found procedure, which guarantees absence of poles in energy plane. The obtained renormalized propagator has one free parameter and is a straight generalization of the famous free propagator of Moldauer and Case. Application of this propagator for production of $\Delta^{++}(1232)$ in $\pi^{+}\particle{p}\to \pi^{+}\particle{p}$ leads to good description of total cross-section and to reasonable agreement with results of partial wave analysis.