Parity violation in γp Compton scattering -: art. no. 055206

Polarized beam <()over right arrow>p Compton scattering provides a theoretically clean way to extract the isovector parity violating pion-nucleon coupling constant h(pi NN)((1)). This channel is more tractable experimentally than the recently proposed extraction of h(pi NN)((1)) from the Bedaque-Savage process-polarized target gamma(p) over right arrow Compton scattering. The leading parity violating effect is calculated using heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. The size of the asymmetry is estimated to be similar to 4 x 10(-8) for 120 MeV photon energy.