K 4 are for several reasons an especially interesting decay channel of K mesons:K 4 decays allow an accurate measurement of a combination of S -wave ππ scattering lengths, one form factor of the decay is connected to the chiral anomaly and the decay is the best source for the determination of some low energy constants of ChPT. We present a dispersive approach to K 4 decays, which takes rescattering effects fully into account. Some fits to NA48/2 and E865 measurements and results of the matching to ChPT are shown.
MotivationK 4 , the semileptonic decay of a kaon into two pions and a lepton-neutrino pair, plays a crucial role in the context of low energy hadron physics, because it provides almost unique information about some of the O(p 4 ) low energy constants (LECs) of Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT), the effective low energy theory of QCD. The physical region of K 4 starts already at the ππ threshold, thus it happens at lower energies than e.g. elastic Kπ scattering. Since ChPT is an expansion in the masses and momenta, it is expected to converge better at lower energies. Therefore K 4 is a particularly interesting process to study.Besides, as the hadronic final state contains two pions, K 4 is also one of the best sources of information on the ππ scattering lengths a 0 0 and a 2 0 [1]. On the experimental side, we are confronted with impressive precision from high statistics measurements. During the last decade, the process has been measured in the E865 experiment at BNL [2] and in the NA48/2 experiment at CERN [1]. Very recently, the NA48/2 collaboration has published the results on the branching ratio and form factors of K 4 , based on more than a million events [3].Here, we present preliminary results of a new dispersive treatment of K 4 decays. Dispersion relations are an interesting tool to treat low energy hadronic processes. They are based on the very general principles of analyticity and unitarity. The derivation of the dispersion relation applies a chiral power counting and is valid up to and including O(p 6 ). The dispersion relation is parametrised by five subtraction constants. As soon as these constants have been fixed, the energy dependence is fully determined by the dispersion relation. The presented method implements a summation of final state rescattering effects, thus we expect it to incorporate the most important contributions beyond O(p 6 ). a