Photon- and pion-nucleon interactions in a unitary and causal effective field theory based on the chiral Lagrangian

We present and apply a novel scheme for studying photon- and pion-nucleon scattering beyond the threshold region. Partial-wave amplitudes for the γN and πN states are obtained by an analytic extrapolation of subthreshold reaction amplitudes computed in chiral perturbation theory, where the constraints set by electromagnetic-gauge invariance, causality and unitarity are used to stabilize the extrapolation. Based on the chiral Lagrangian we recover the empirical s- and p-wave amplitudes up to energies s≃1300 MeV in terms of the parameters relevant at order Q3.