Radiative and chiral corrections to elastic lepton-proton scattering in chiral perturbation theory

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of chiral and radiative corrections to low-energy elastic lepton-proton scattering within Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory, highlighting significant corrections and uncertainties relevant for precision experiments like MUSE.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, model-independent framework for calculating both chiral and radiative corrections, including next-to-next-to-leading order terms, with systematic treatment of infrared and ultraviolet divergences.

Findings

Chiral corrections can reach 10-20% for electron and muon scattering.

Radiative corrections are about 2% for muons and up to 25% for electrons.

Largest theoretical uncertainty stems from proton radius measurements.

Abstract

A unified treatment of both chiral and radiative corrections to the low-energy elastic lepton-proton scattering processes is presented in Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbations Theory. The proton hadronic chiral corrections include the next-to-next-to leading order corrections whereas the radiative corrections include the next-to-leading order terms in our novel power counting scheme. We find that the net fractional well-defined chiral corrections with respect to the leading order Born cross section can be as large as $10\%$ ($20\%$) for electron (muon) scattering process for MUon proton Scattering Experiment (MUSE) kinematics. We show {\it via} our model-independent treatment of the low-energy lepton-proton kinematics, that the largest theoretical uncertainty is due to the recent different published values of the proton's rms radius while, e.g., the next higher order hadronic chiral terms are expected to give rather nominal errors. For the radiative corrections we demonstrate a systematic order by order cancellation of all infrared singularities and present our finite ultraviolet regularization results. We find that the radiative corrections for muon-proton scattering is of the order of $2\%$, whereas for electron scattering the radiative corrections could be as large as $25\%$. We attribute such a contrasting result partially to the fact that in muon scattering the leading radiative order correction goes through zero in some intermediate low-momentum transfer region, leaving the sub-leading radiative chiral order effects to play a dominant role in this particular kinematic region. For the low-energy MUSE experiment, the often neglected lepton mass as well as the Pauli form factor contributions of the relativistic leptons are incorporated in all our computations.