Neutral-current weak pion production off the nucleon in covariant chiral perturbation theory

Abstract Neutral current single pion production induced by neutrinos and antineutrinos on nucleon targets has been investigated in manifestly relativistic baryon chiral perturbation theory with explicit Δ ( 1232 ) degrees of freedom up to O ( p 3 ) . At low energies, where chiral perturbation theory is applicable, the total cross sections for the different reaction channels exhibit a sizable non-resonant contribution, which is not present in event generators of broad use in neutrino oscillation and cross section experiments such as GENIE and NuWro.