How strange is pion electroproduction?

Understand

We consider pion production in parity-violating electron scattering (PVES) in the presence of nucleon strangeness in the framework of partial wave analysis with unitarity.

• Using the experimental bounds on the strange form factors obtained in elastic PVES, we study the sensitivity of the parity-violating asymmetry to strange nucleon form factors.
• For forward kinematics and electron energies above 1 GeV, we observe that this sensitivity may reach about 20\% in the threshold region.
• With parity-violating asymmetries being as large as tens p.p.m., this study suggests that threshold pion production in PVES can be used as a promising way to better constrain strangeness contributions.