Abstract
The one-nucleon contribution to threshold pion production in pion-nucleus collisions is calculated using a Fermi gas model of the nuclear excitation spectrum in order to carry out the sum over final nuclear states. For the one-body input a threshold approximant to the production amplitude from the phenomenological Lagrangian theory is used. The cross sections are found to have an η4 dependence near threshold, where η=(ωk2mπ)mπ for total incident pion energy ωk. In a simple eikonal approach incident pion attenuation is found to lead to a reduction of threshold estimates by a factor of ∼ 10.