Direct Channel Dominance in Goldstone Boson Scattering in the Resonance Region

We consider the scattering of Goldstone bosons in the range of intermediate energies, and in particular focus our attention on the scattering of pions in the $\rho$-resonance region. The chiral perturbation series is obtained to order $E^4$ from a chiral $SU(2)\times SU(2)$ invariant effective Lagrangian. At order $E^4$, we isolate the low-energy manifestation of heavy particle exchange in the s-channel. We find that the contributions of this type to the I=1 and I=2 amplitudes have a one parameter dependence. This observation provides a symmetry rationale for Chanowitz's recent observation that in a chiral model with an explicitly coupled $\rho$, the I=1 and I=2 channels are strongly correlated. In order to realize, in a quantitative way, the fact that in the resonance region the direct-channel dominates, we make use of a simple and intuitive unitarization scheme. This allows us to derive a renormalization constant-independent relation for the I=1 and I=2 phase shifts. With the assumption of a $\rho$-resonance, this relation determines the position of a pole at euclidean momentum in the I=2 channel. Through an analysis based on the theory of redundant poles and the Adler sum rule we show that this ``tachyon'' pole actually represents a physical contribution to the unitary amplitude which accounts for $\rho$ and $\epsilon$ exchange in the u-channel.