Pion production in proton-proton collisions in a covariant one-boson-exchange model

Abstract

Motivated by the renewed interest in studying the pion production on nuclei with protons at few GeV incident energies, we investigate the pion production in proton-proton collisions over an energy range of 300 $MeV$ to 2 $GeV$. Starting from a realistic one-boson exchange model with parameters fitted to the amplitudes of the elastic nucleon-nucleon scattering, we perform fully covariant calculations for the total, double and triple differential cross-sections of the $p(p,n\pi^+)p$ and $p(p,p\pi^0)p$ reactions. The calculations incorporate the exchange of $\pi, \rho,\omega$ and $\sigma$ mesons and treat nucleon and delta isobar as intermediate states. We obtain a reasonably good agreement with the experimental data in the entire range of beam energies. The form of the covariant delta propagator, the cut-off parameter for the $\pi NN$ and $\pi N\Delta$ vertex form factors and the energy dependence of the delta isobar decay width is investigated.