Measurement of the beam asymmetry Σ in the forward direction for γ⃗ p → p π 0

Photoproduction of neutral pions has been studied with the CBELSA/TAPS detector for photon energies between 0.92 and 1.68 GeV at the electron stretcher accelerator ELSA. The beam asymmetry Σ has been extracted for 115° < θ c.m. < 155° of the π 0 meson and for θ c.m. < 60°. The new beam-asymmetry data cover the very forward region, which extend previously published data for the same reaction by our collaboration and improve the world database for photon energies above 1.5 GeV. The angular dependence of Σ shows overall good agreement with the SAID parametrization.