Vector mesons in meson-baryon scattering and large-N_c quantum chromodynamics

We examined strong interactions in the low-energy regime in terms of two complementary non-perturbative approaches: the interplay of large-N_c QCD and chiral perturbation theory was studied. While the expansion in the parameter 1/N_c is based on quark and gluon degrees of freedom, chiral perturbation theory uses hadrons as effective degrees of freedom. The focus of our work was the investigation of mesons and baryons composed from up-, down- and strange quarks. We used the chiral SU(3) Lagrangian with (J^P=(1)/(2)⁺)- and (J^P=(3)/(2)⁺)-baryon ground states as building blocks. In the SU(3)-flavour limit the latter form an octet and a decuplet, respectively. Studies in chiral perturbation theory hold a challenge: the chiral Lagrangian consists of an infinite number of terms. The treatment of low-energy QCD physics via a perturbation theory requires the ordering of these terms according to their relevance. We used the interplay between large-N_c QCD and chiral perturbation theory to shed light on the structure of the chiral Lagrangian. In the limit of large-N_c the low-energy parameters of the chiral Lagrangian are correlated. For instance the masses of the two baryon multiplets turn degenerate in the SU(3)-flavour limit. This serves as the starting point of our investigations. In this work we analysed the time-ordered product of two scalar and two vector currents in the baryon ground state. The examination of these matrix elements at large-N_c was compared to corresponding results derived in chiral perturbation theory. From this we obtained sum rules for some low-energy parameters of the chiral Lagrangian. The results for the vector correlation function were used to constrain a phenomenological interaction of light vector mesons with the baryon ground states. In the second part of this thesis we addressed a formal problem which arises in a partial wave decomposition of reaction amplitudes for particles with non-vanishing spin. In particular we considered the vector meson photoproduction off the nucleon as it is currently studied by e.g. Jude (2015), Wilson (2015) or Sokhoyan (2015). A decomposition of on-shell production amplitudes into covariant partial wave amplitudes which are both free from kinematical constraints and compatible with the microcausality condition was achieved. A Mathematica code using the FeynCalc package was written and applied to some tree-level contact terms and s-, u- and t-channel processes.