Measurements of the cross section for photoproduction of [...] mesons from hydrogen have been extended to angles as small as 5[...] in the c. m. system, using a magnetic spectrometer. At a photon energy of 1025 Mev, the cross section decreases as the angle changes from 5[degrees] to 13[degrees], reaching a minimum before increasing again to the maximum near 40[degrees] which has been previously observed (5). Less extensive measurements at energies 700, 800, 900, and 960 Mev all show a similar rapid decrease with angle in the angular range less than 15[degrees] c.m., although below 960 Mev no actual minimum is observed. These effects at small angles arise presumably from the "retardation term", or "meson current" term and its interference with other contributions to the photoproduction amplitude. It is interesting that a minimum near 15[degrees] is characteristic of the pure Born approximation (retardation term plus "S-wave"). Values of the 0[degree] cross section that are much more accurate than previous estimates have been obtained. An attempt has been made to extract a value of the pion-nucleon coupling constant by an extrapolation into the region cos [...]. Using the best set of data, the value obtained was [...].

The bremsstrahlung beam of the Cornell Bev electron synchrotron has been used to study the reaction γ+p→π0+p over the photon energy range 250 Mev to 1 Bev, and for center-of-mass pion angles between 20° and 70°. The recoil protons, of energies between 10 and 60 Mev, were identified and their energies determined using a range telescope of eight thin plastic scintillators enclosed in a vacuum chamber with the thin liquid hydrogen target. Correlated pulse-height information was obtained by photographing an oscilloscope display and was used to sort out the protons from mesons and electrons. Corrections were made for the background of photoprotons from the Mylar target cup, the energy loss of the protons in the liquid hydrogen, absorption and scattering in the counter telescope, and the variation of beam intensity profile with energy. Compared with previous experiments and extrapolations the results show a somewhat smaller forward differential cross section above 400 Mev. The angular distributions obtained from a least-squares fit to all existing data indicate a d32 assignment for the 760-Mev resonance level. Other implications of the data are also discussed.