Radiative corrections in K --> 3 pi decays

TL;DR

This paper develops a non-relativistic framework to accurately compute radiative corrections in K --> 3 pi decays, including real and virtual photons, enabling precise extraction of pi pi scattering lengths from experimental data.

Contribution

It extends existing non-relativistic methods to incorporate electromagnetic effects beyond soft-photon approximation, aligning with relativistic results and addressing pionium singularities.

Findings

Real photons included exactly, beyond soft-photon approximation

Framework reproduces relativistic correction results

Identifies a region suitable for perturbative alpha calculations

Abstract

We investigate radiative corrections to K --> 3 pi decays. In particular, we extend the non-relativistic framework developed recently to include real and virtual photons and show that, in a well-defined power counting scheme, the results reproduce corrections obtained in the relativistic calculation. Real photons are included exactly, beyond the soft-photon approximation, and we compare the result with the latter. The singularities generated by pionium near threshold are investigated, and a region is identified where standard perturbation theory in the fine structure constant alpha may be applied. We expect that the formulae provided allow one to extract S-wave pi pi scattering lengths from the cusp effect in these decays with high precision.