Roy–Steiner-equation analysis of pion–nucleon scattering

Abstract

Low-energy pion–nucleon scattering is relevant for many areas in nuclear and hadronic physics, ranging from the scalar couplings of the nucleon to the long-range part of two-pion-exchange potentials and three-nucleon forces in Chiral Effective Field Theory. In this talk, we show how the fruitful combination of dispersion-theoretical methods, in particular in the form of Roy–Steiner equations, with modern high-precision data on hadronic atoms allows one to determine the pion–nucleon scattering amplitudes at low energies with unprecedented accuracy. Special attention will be paid to the extraction of the pion–nucleon σ -term, and we discuss in detail the current tension with recent lattice results, as well as the determination of the low-energy constants of chiral perturbation theory.