Neutral Pion Photoproduction on Nuclei in Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory

Abstract

Threshold neutral pion photoproduction on light nuclei is studied in the framework of baryon chiral perturbation theory. We obtain a general formula for the electric dipole amplitude in the special case of neutral pion photoproduction on a nucleus. To third order in small momenta, the amplitude is a sum of 2- and 3-body interactions with no undetermined parameters. With reasonable input from the single nucleon sector, our result for neutral pion photoproduction on the deuteron is in agreement with experiment.

Comments: 24 pages, 4 uuencoded postscript figures, uses LaTex and epsf.tex. Added footnote and references. Minor changes in text and format