Dilepton production in pion-nucleon collisions in an effective field theory approach

Abstract: We present a model of electron-positron pair production in pion-nucleon collisions in the exclusive reaction \pi N -> Ne^+e^-. The model is based on an effective field theory approach, incorporating 16 baryon resonances below 2 GeV. Parameters of the model are fitted to pion photoproduction data. We present the resulting dilepton invariant mass spectra for \pi^- p collisions up to sqrt(s)=1.9 GeV center-of-mass collision energy. These results are meant to give predictions for the planned experiments at the HADES spectrometer in GSI, Darmstadt.