Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 198, 133-140 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2011-01487-x

Regular Article

Neutral pion production in the threshold region

¹ Department of Physics, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, Canada
² Department of Physics and Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

^a e-mail: dhornidge@mta.ca
^b e-mail: bernstein@mit.edu

Received: 8 July 2011
Revised: 21 July 2011
Published online: 23 September 2011

Abstract

We give an overview of the physics motivation and evolution of the neutral pion photoproduction measurements in the threshold region conducted in the A2 collaboration at MAMI. The latest two experiments have been performed with the almost 4π Crystal Ball detector. The first was with a linearly polarized photon beam and unpolarized liquid-hydrogen target. The data analysis is now complete and the linearly polarized beam asymmetry along with differential cross sections provide the most stringent test to date of the predictions of Chiral Perturbation Theory and its energy region of convergence. More recently a measurement was performed using both circularly polarized photons and a transversely polarized butanol frozen-spin target, with the goal of extracting both the target and beam-target asymmetries. From these we intend to extract πN scattering sensitive information for the first time in photo-pion reactions. This will be used to test isospin conservation and further test dynamics of chiral symmetry breaking in QCD as calculated at low energies by Chiral Perturbation Theory.