Astrid Hiller Blin

Threshold Neutral Pion Photoproduction on the Proton

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.

In-Medium Properties of the ϕ Meson with ϕ N Resonant Contributions

Nuclear production experiments report missing absorption processes of the in-medium phi meson. Contributions arising from the K-bar K cloud have already been widely studied, and therefore we investigate the phi-meson properties in cold nuclear matter with the additional inclusion of resonant phi N interactions. Two models are considered which dynamically generate N*-like states close to the phi N threshold. We find that these states, together with the non-resonant part of the amplitude, contribute to the phi self-energy with the same order of magnitude as the K-bar K effects. At non-vanishing nuclear density, both models lead to an additional in-medium broadening of the phi, up to around 50 MeV. Furthermore, at least one of the models is compatible with a mass shift to lower energies of up to 35 MeV at threshold and normal matter density. Finally, a double-peak structure appears in the spectral function due to the mixing of resonance-hole modes with the

Hyperon forward spin polarizability

\phi

\gamma_0

quasi-particle peak. These results converge into the direction of the experimental findings.