Chiral nucleon dynamics

Abstract

These lectures give an introduction to baryon chiral perturbation theory. I show in detail how to construct the chiral effective pion-nucleon Lagrangian in the one loop approximation. Particular emphasis is put on the physics related to electromagnetic probes, as manifest in pion photo- and electroproduction, Compton scattering off nucleons and the electroweak form factors of the nucleon. Other topics discussed in some detail are the meaning of low-energy theorems, pion-nucleon scattering, the reaction $πN \to ππN$ and isospin violation in the pion-nucleon system. The chiral predictions are confronted with the existing data. Some remaining problems and new developments are outlined.