On-Shell Approach to Pion-Nucleon Physics

Abstract

We discuss an on-shell approach to pion-nucleon physics that is consistent order by order in a $1/f_{\pi}$ expansion with the chiral reduction formula, crossing, and relativistic unitarity. A number of constraints between the on-shell low-energy parameters are derived at tree level in the presence of the pion-nucleon sigma term, and found to be in fair agreement with experiment. We analyze the nucleon form factors, and the $\pi N\to \pi N$ scattering amplitude to one-loop, as well as $\pi N\to\pi\pi N$ to tree level. We use the latter to derive a new constraint for the pion-nucleon sigma term at threshold. We compare our results to both relativistic and non-relativistic chiral perturbation theory, and discuss the convergence character of the expansion in light of experiment.