Dispersive analysis of the experimental data on the electromagnetic form factor of charged pions at spacelike momenta

TL;DR

This paper employs a dispersive matrix approach to analyze spacelike electromagnetic form factor data of charged pions, providing a model-independent determination of the pion charge radius and insights into the onset of perturbative QCD.

Contribution

The study introduces a dispersive matrix method that incorporates unitarity and analyticity constraints nonperturbatively, offering a new, model-independent way to determine the pion charge radius from spacelike data.

Findings

The dispersive matrix method yields a pion charge radius of 0.703 ± 0.027 fm.

Results from traditional z-expansions agree with the dispersive matrix approach.

The analysis suggests perturbative QCD effects become relevant only at very large momenta.

Abstract

The experimental data on the electromagnetic form factor of charged pions available at spacelike momenta are analyzed using the Dispersive Matrix (DM) approach, which describes the momentum dependence of hadronic form factors without introducing any explicit parameterization and includes properly the constraints coming from unitarity and analyticity. The unitary bound is evaluated nonperturbatively making use of the results of lattice QCD simulations of suitable two-point correlation functions contributing to the HVP term of the muon. Thanks to the DM method we determine the pion charge radius from existing spacelike data in a completely model-independent way and consistently with the unitary bound, obtaining $< r_\pi >_{DM} = 0.703 \pm 0.027$ fm. This finding differs by $\simeq 1.6$ standard deviations from the latest PDG value $< r_\pi >_{PDG} = 0.659 \pm 0.004$ fm, which is dominated by the very precise results of dispersive analyses of timelike data coming from measurements of the cross section of the $e^+ e^- \to \pi^+ \pi^-$ process. We have analyzed the spacelike data using also traditional $z$-expansions, like the Boyd-Grinstein-Lebed (BGL) or Bourrely-Caprini-Lellouch (BCL) fitting functions and adopting a simple procedure that incorporates ab initio the non-perturbative unitary bound in the fitting process. We get $< r_\pi >_{BGL} = 0.711 \pm 0.039$ fm and $< r_\pi >_{BCL} = 0.709 \pm 0.028$ fm in nice agreement with the DM result. We have addressed also the issue of the onset of perturbative QCD by performing a sensitivity study of the pion form factor at large spacelike momenta, based only on experimental spacelike data and unitarity. Hence, although the leading pQCD behaviour is found to set in only at very large momenta, our DM bands may provide information about the pre-asymptotic effects related to the scale dependence of the pion distribution amplitude.