Abstract. The COMPASS experiment at CERN accesses pion-photon reactions via the Primakoff effect., where high-energetic pions react with the quasi-real photon field surrounding the target nuclei. When a single real photon is produced, pion Compton scattering is accessed and from the measured cross-section shape, the pion polarisability is determined. The COMPASS measurement is in contradiction to the earlier dedicated measurements, and rather in agreement with the theoretical expectation from ChPT. In the same experimental data taking, reactions with neutral and charged pions in the final state are measured and analyzed in the context of chiral perturbation theory.
Pion-photon reactions as test of chiral perturbation theoryProperties of the pions ( − , 0 , + ) are of crucial interest in understanding quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and its low-momentum expansion, chiral perturbation theory (ChPT), where the pions are identified as the Goldstone bosons emerging from the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry.Pion-pion scattering has been studied in several approaches, and successfully described within ChPT. In contrast, for pion-photon interactions even the most fundamental process, i.e. Compton scattering still is a riddle. The leading structure-dependent term in this process is the polarisability, and its first experimental determinations resulted in values significantly higher than expected from most of the theoretical approaches, which motivated the present work. In addition, other pion-photon interactions with more pions in the final state came into reach, and are also studied.
Primakoff technique and the pion polarisabilityInteractions of high-energetic hadrons with the nuclear Coulomb field represent a scattering off the quasi-real photon density, referred to as Primakoff reactions. The cross-section for a reaction − A → X − A on a nucleus A reads, in one-photon exchange approximation (see e.g.a