Neutral pion photoproduction on protons in fully covariant ChPT with Delta(1232) loop contributions

Abstract: We study the neutral pion photoproduction at near-threshold energies in fully covariant chiral perturbation theory up to O(p^3). When including only nucleonic virtual states in the model, the convergence is too slow. Therefore we test the model when introducing the Delta(1232) resonance as an additional degree of freedom. Some low-energy constants were fitted, converging to values in good agreement with those expected from literature.