ZRH22: An improved analysis of the pion-nucleon measurements at low energy

TL;DR

This study presents an improved low-energy pion-nucleon interaction analysis, removing outliers, performing phase-shift analysis, and fitting the ETH model to better understand scattering parameters and coupling constants.

Contribution

It introduces a new multi-step analysis procedure, including outlier removal and separate model fitting, to refine low-energy pion-nucleon scattering data analysis.

Findings

Charged-pion coupling constant squared: 0.0764(15)

Identified and removed 52 outliers from initial database

Compared predictions of phase-shift analysis and ETH model fits

Abstract

Carried out in this study is an improved analysis of the measurements of the three pion-nucleon ($\pi N$) reactions, which can be subjected to experimental investigation at low energy (pion laboratory kinetic energy $T \leq 100$ MeV), i.e., of the two elastic-scattering (ES) processes $\pi^\pm p \to \pi^\pm p$ and of the $\pi^- p$ charge-exchange (CX) reaction $\pi^- p \to \pi^0 n$. After the application of the four steps of the first phase of the new analysis procedure, $52$ entries - of the $1150$ degrees of freedom of the new initial database (DB) of this project - were identified as outliers and were removed from the input. In this manner, three `clean' (devoid of outliers) DBs were obtained, which were submitted to further analysis using the ETH model. The phase-shift analysis (PSA) of the ES measurements comprises the results of one hundred joint fits to the data, each fit being carried out at one value (randomly generated, in normal distribution, according to a recent result) of the model parameter $m_\sigma$, which is associated with the effective range of the scalar-isoscalar part of the $\pi N$ interaction. The result of the PSA of the ES data for the (square of the) charged-pion coupling constant $f_c$ is: $f_c^2=0.0764(15)$. An exclusive fit of the ETH model to the low-energy $\pi^- p$ CX DB was also performed, for the first time in the recent years, after suppressing the contributions to the partial-wave amplitudes of the ETH model which originate from the scalar-isoscalar $t$-channel Feynman diagram. The predictions, obtained from these two types of fits (PSA of the ES data and exclusive fit of the ETH model to the $\pi^- p$ CX DB) for the (popular) symmetrised relative difference $R_2$ were compared in the entire low-energy region, separately for the $s$ wave, as well as for the no-spin-flip and spin-flip $p$-wave parts of the $\pi N$ scattering amplitude.