Pion photoproduction off the proton in a gauge-invariant chiral unitary framework

Abstract: We investigate pion photoproduction off the proton in a manifestly gauge-invariant chiral unitary extension of chiral perturbation theory. In a first step, we consider meson-baryon scattering taking into account all next-to-leading order contact interactions. The resulting low-energy constants are determined by a fit to s-wave pion-nucleon scattering and the low-energy data for the reaction pi- p --> eta n. To assess the theoretical uncertainty, we perform two different fit strategies. Having determined the low-energy constants, we then analyse the data on the s-wave multipole amplitudes E0+ of pion and eta photoproduction. These are parameter-free predictions, as the two new low-energy constants are determined by the neutron and proton magnetic moments.