Extraction of Meson Resonances from Three-pions Photo-production Reactions

TL;DR

This study examines how different theoretical models affect the extraction of meson resonance properties from three-pion photoproduction data, highlighting the importance of unitarity constraints for accurate resonance characterization.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of model dependence on resonance parameters and emphasizes the need for unitarity-constrained models in three-particle decay analyses.

Findings

Resonance positions agree well between models when fitting data accurately.

Residues of narrow, isolated resonances are consistent across models.

Overlapping resonances show significant discrepancies in extracted residues.

Abstract

We have investigated the model dependence of meson resonance properties extracted from the Dalitz-plot analysis of the three-pions photoproduction reactions on the nucleon. Within a unitary model developed in Phys. Rev. D 84, 114019 (2011), we generate Dalitz-plot distributions as data to perform an isobar model fit that is similar to most of the previous analyses of three-pion production reactions. It is found that the resonance positions from the two models agree well when both fit the data accurately, except for the resonance poles near branch points. The residues of the resonant amplitudes extracted from the two models and by the usual Breit-Wigner procedure agree well only for the isolated resonances with narrow widths. For overlapping resonances, most of the extracted residues could be drastically different. Our results suggest that even with high precision data, the resonance extraction should be based on models within which the amplitude parametrization is constrained by three-particle unitarity condition.