Chirality Conservation and Soft-Pion Production in Pion-Nucleon Collisions

Abstract

The formalism for soft-pion emission previously developed on the basis of the hypothesis of chirality conservation is applied to the production of soft pions in pion-nucleon collisions. Specific predictions are calculated for the class of least inelastic production events in which extraneous effects such as final-state interactions are most nearly under control. For these events angular distributions of the inelastically scattered projectile pions are calculated very simply from the corresponding phenomenological elastic-scattering data. Comparison of these results is made with the only relevant experiment, and no contradiction is indicated with the angular distributions, although the magnitudes of the cross sections seem to be significantly underestimated by a factor of about 7. The high-energy predictions of the formalism are summarily indicated. The relation of the chirality conservation formalism to pion production in peripheral processes suggests that these processes are to be understood in terms of symmetry-violating effects.