Threshold Neutral Pion Photoproduction on the Proton

Abstract: The neutral pion photoproduction on the proton near threshold has a very small scattering cross section when compared to the charged channels, which in ChPT is explained by strong cancellations between the lowest order pieces. Therefore it is very sensitive to higher-order corrections of chiral perturbation theory. We perform a fully covariant calculation up to chiral order p^3 and we investigate the effect of the inclusion of the Delta(1232) resonance as an explicit degree of freedom. We show that the convergence improves, leading to a much better agreement with data at a wide range of energies.