If physics beyond the Standard Model enters well above the electroweak scale, its low-energy effects are described by Standard Model Effective Field Theory. Already at dimension six many operators involve the antisymmetric quark tensor $bar q sigma^{
mu u} q$, whose matrix elements are difficult to constrain from experiment, Ward identities, or low-energy theorems, in contrast to the corresponding vector and axial-vector or even scalar and pseudoscalar currents. However, with normalizations determined from lattice QCD, analyticity and unitarity often allow one to predict the momentum dependence in a large kinematic range. Starting from recent results in the meson sector, we extend this method to the nucleon case and, in combination with pole dominance, provide a comprehensive assessment of the current status of the nucleon form factors of the quark tensor.
We present an extraction of the pion-nucleon ($pi N$) scattering lengths from low-energy $pi N$ scattering, by fitting a representation based on Roy-Steiner equations to the low-energy data base. We show that the resulting values confirm the scatteri
ng-length determination from pionic atoms, and discuss the stability of the fit results regarding electromagnetic corrections and experimental normalization uncertainties in detail. Our results provide further evidence for a large $pi N$ $sigma$-term, $sigma_{pi N}=58(5)$ MeV, in agreement with, albeit less precise than, the determination from pionic atoms.
The pion-nucleon $sigma$-term can be stringently constrained by the combination of analyticity, unitarity, and crossing symmetry with phenomenological information on the pion-nucleon scattering lengths. Recently, lattice calculations at the physical
point have been reported that find lower values by about $3sigma$ with respect to the phenomenological determination. We point out that a lattice measurement of the pion-nucleon scattering lengths could help resolve the situation by testing the values extracted from spectroscopy measurements in pionic atoms.
