Polarization and dilepton anisotropy in pion-nucleon collisions

Hadronic polarization and the related anisotropy of the dilepton angular distribution are studied for the reaction $\pi N \rightarrow Ne^+ e^-$. We employ consistent effective interactions for baryon resonances up to spin-5/2, where non-physical degrees of freedom are eliminated, to compute the anisotropy coefficients for isolated intermediate baryon resonances. It is shown that the spin and parity of the intermediate baryon resonance is reflected in the angular dependence of the anisotropy coefficient. We then compute the anisotropy coefficient including the $N(1520)$ and $N(1440)$ resonances, which are essential at the collision energy of the recent data obtained by the HADES collaboration on this reaction. We conclude that the anisotropy coefficient provides useful constraints for unravelling the resonance contributions to this process.