The role of the background in the extraction of resonance contributions from meson-baryon scattering

The separation of background and resonance contributions in pion-nucleon scattering is an often discussed issue. We investigate to what extent the background can be separated from the pole contribution. For illustration we use results from an analytic model for the meson-baryon interaction derived from meson exchange. We focus on the two distinct cases of an elastic and a highly inelastic resonance, namely the Delta(1232) and the Delta*(1700). Our results are also relevant for studies of dynamically generated resonances and attempts to extract bare quantities from hadronic models to be compared to quark model results.