Coherent Photoproduction of Eta-Mesons on Spin-Zero Nuclei in a Relativistic, Non-local Model

The coherent photoproduction of $\eta$-mesons on spin-zero nuclei is studied in a relativistic, non-local model, which we have previously applied to the coherent photoproduction of pions. We find that different off-shell extrapolations of the elementary production operator lead to large effects in the cross section. We also show that the almost complete suppression of the N(1535) seen in earlier studies on this reaction is a result of the local or factorization approximation used in these works. Non-local effects can lead to a considerable contribution from this resonance. The relative size of the N(1535) contribution depends on the structure of the nucleus under consideration. We give an estimate for the contribution of the N(1520) resonance and discuss the effect of an $\eta$-nucleus optical potential