The development of a dynamical model for investigating the nucleon resonances using the reactions of meson production from πN , γN , N (e, e ′ ), and N (ν, l ) reactions is reviewed. The results for the ∆ (1232) state are summarized and discussed. The progress in investigating higher mass nucleon resonances is reported.N (ν, l π)N reactions.The main challenge of developing dynamical reaction models of meson production reactions in the higher mass N * region can be seen in Fig.1. We see that two-pion photo-production cross sections shown in the left-hand-side become larger than the one-pion photo-production as the γp invariant mass exceeds W ∼ 1.4 GeV. In the right-hand-side, KY ( K + Λ, K + Σ 0 , K 0 Σ + ), ηp, and ωp production cross sections are a factor of about 10 weaker than the dominant π + π − p production. From the unitarity condition, we have for any single meson production processwhere ρ α denotes an appropriate phase space factor for the channel α. The large two-pion production cross sections seen in Fig.1 indicate that the second term in the right-hand-side of Eq.(1) is significant and hence the single meson production reactions above the ∆ region must be influenced strongly by the coupling with the two-pion channels. Similarly, the two-pion production γN → ππN is also influenced by the transition to two-body M B channelClearly, a sound dynamical reaction model must be able to describe the two pion production and to account for the above unitarity conditions. Such a model has been developed by using the unitary transformation method in Ref.[8] and applied to investigate πN elastic scattering[10], γN → πN reactions[11] πN → ηN reactions[12], and πN → ππN reactions[13]. In this article, we will also review these results. This article is organized as follows. In section 2, we explain the unitary transformation method developed in Ref.[31] using a simple model. The constructed model Hamiltonian for investigating N * states is given in section 3. The multi-channel multi-resonance reaction model developed in Refs.[4,8] for calculating the mesonbaryon reaction amplitudes is presented in section 4. In section 5, we give formula for defining the N -N * transition form factors and calculating the cross sections of pion production from πN , γN , N (e, e ′ ), and N (ν, l ) reactions. The results in the ∆ (1232) region and in the higher mass N * region are reviewed in section 6. A summary and discussions of future developments are given in section 7.
Unitary Transformation MethodThe unitary transformation method was essentially based on the same idea of the Foldy-Wouthuysenth transformation developed in the study of electromagnetic interactions. It was first developed in 1950's by Fukuda, Sawada and Taketani [32], and independently by Okubo[33]. This approach, called the FST-Okubo method, has been very useful in investigating nuclear electromagnetic currents [34,35] and relativistic descriptions of nuclear interactions [36,37,38]. The advantage of this approach is that the resulting effective Hamiltonian is energy...