Elastic $\pi$N scattering to ${\cal O}(p^3)}$ in heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory

Abstract.

The elastic $\pi$N scattering amplitude in the isospin limit is calculated in the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory, up to the third order. Threshold parameters like scattering lengths, volumes, effective ranges, etc. are compared with data. All relevant low energy constants are fixed from the available pion-nucleon data. A clear improvement in the description of data is observed, when going from the first two orders in the chiral expansion to the third one. The importance of even higher orders is suggested by the results.