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HK: Fachverband Hadronen und Kerne

HK 67: Poster Session

HK 67.24: Poster

Thursday, March 19, 2009, 14:00–16:00, Audi-Max

Near-Threshold Pion Photproduction at MAX-lab — •Jason Brudvik — for the MAX-Tagg Collaboration MAX-lab, Lund University, Sweden

Near-threshold pion photoproduction is an elementary process involving an explicit rearrangement of the quarks in the nucleon. It is thus a direct probe of the quark structure of the nucleon. At energies below the Delta resonance, pion photoproduction also provides a stringent test of chiral symmetry as a result of accurate predictions from chiral effective field theory. Precision sub-Delta measurements of the angular distribution and the total cross section for pion photoproduction are thus of fundamental importance. Surprisingly, aside from the γp→pπ⁰ channel which has been thoroughly studied at MAMI-B and SAL, few data exist in this crucial near-threshold region. MAX-lab in Sweden is the one photonuclear facility worldwide whose energy range is perfectly tuned to such experiments. As such, a comprehensive program of near-threshold pion photoproduction experiments has recently been initiated. These experiments include measurements of the angular distribution for π⁺ photoproduction in the p-wave energy region for both the proton and heavier targets and the total cross section for π⁻ photoproduction close to threshold using a deuterium target. In this poster, an overview of the pion photoproduction program at MAX-lab will be presented. This overview will include preliminary results from commissioning runs for the previously mentioned experiments together with a look at future plans.