Charge Symmetry Breaking and Nuclear Pion Production Reactions

Abstract: Large momentum transfer reactions such as pion production represent the frontier of Chiral Perturbation Theory and must be understood before more complex reactions can be considered. Pion production is also interesting in its own right, one application being the hadronic extraction of a charge symmetry breaking parameter: the contribution of the down-up quark mass difference to the neutron-proton mass difference. This dissertation reports on two primary projects: (1) a calculation of the charge symmetry breaking forward-backward asymmetry of the differential cross section of the n p -> d pi^0 reaction, and (2) the development of a new theoretical framework addressing the issue of reducibility in the impulse approximation's contribution to pion production. It is shown that the traditional one-body impulse approximation must be replaced by a two-body operator which makes a larger contribution to s-wave pion production.