Low Energy Pion--Nucleon Scattering in the Heavy Baryon and Infrared Schemes

Abstract

We study pion--nucleon scattering with a chiral lagrangian of pions, nucleons, and $\Delta$-isobars to order $Q^3$, where $Q$ is a generic small momentum. We compare the results from heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory with those from the infrared regularization scheme. While the former provides a reasonable fit to the data out to a pion c.m. kinetic energy of 100 MeV, the latter is only able to fit up to 40 MeV and even then the parameters obtained are unreasonable. Difficulties with the infrared scheme in the $u$-channel are discussed.