We present a gauge invariant approach to photoproduction of mesons on nucleons within a chiral unitary framework. The interaction kernel for meson-baryon scattering is derived from the chiral effective Lagrangian and iterated in a Bethe-Salpeter equa
tion. Within the leading order approximation to the interaction kernel, data on kaon photoproduction from SAPHIR, CLAS and CBELSA/TAPS are analyzed in the threshold region. The importance of gauge invariance and the precision of various approximations in the interaction kernel utilized in earlier works are discussed.
The decays eta, eta-prime --> pi+ pi- l+ l- (with l = e, mu) are investigated within a chiral unitary approach which combines the chiral effective Lagrangian with a coupled-channels Bethe-Salpeter equation. Predictions for the decay widths and spectra are given.
