Virtual Photon Emission in Leptonic Decays of Charged Pseudoscalar Mesons

TL;DR

This paper explores the calculation of structure-dependent form factors in radiative leptonic decays of pseudoscalar mesons using lattice QCD, aiming to improve understanding of meson structure and decay rates.

Contribution

It introduces a strategy to extract SD form factors from lattice simulations and provides exploratory results for kaon decay channels, separating SD and point-like contributions.

Findings

SD form factors can be extracted with good precision

Decay rate results are in reasonable agreement with experimental data

Method demonstrates potential for future physical quark mass calculations

Abstract

We study the radiative leptonic decays $P\to\ell\nu_\ell\,\ell^{\prime\,+}\ell^{\prime\,-}$, where $P$ is a pseudoscalar meson and $\ell$ and $\ell^\prime$ are charged leptons. In such decays the emitted photon is off-shell and, in addition to the "point-like" contribution in which the virtual photon is emitted either from the lepton or the meson treated as a point-like particle, four structure-dependent (SD) form factors contribute to the amplitude. We present a strategy for the extraction of the SD form factors and implement it in an exploratory lattice computation of the decay rates for the four channels of kaon decays ($\ell,\ell^\prime=e,\mu$). It is the SD form factors which describe the interaction between the virtual photon and the internal hadronic structure of the decaying meson, and in our procedure we separate the SD and point-like contributions to the amplitudes. We demonstrate that the form factors can be extracted with good precision and, in spite of the unphysical quark masses used in our simulation ($m_\pi\simeq 320\,$MeV and $m_K\simeq 530\,$MeV), the results for the decay rates are in reasonable semiquantitative agreement with experimental data (for the channels where these exist). Following this preparatory work, the emphasis of our future work will be on obtaining results at physical quark masses and on the control of the systematic uncertainties associated with discretisation and finite-volume errors.