Neutral pion photoproduction off nucleons revisited

We investigate threshold pion photoproduction in the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. We give the expansion of the electric dipole amplitude E(0+) to three orders in mu, the ratio of the pion to nucleon mass, and show that it is slowly converging. We argue that this observable is not a good testing ground for the chiral dynamics of QCD. In contrast, we exhibit new and fastly converging low-energy theorems in the P-waves which should be used to constrain the data analysis. We also discuss the importance of polarization observables to accurately pin down certain multipoles and give predictions for the reaction gamma n --> pi(0)n.