We present a detailed analysis of S-wave Kπ scattering up to 2 GeV, making use of the resonance chiral Lagrangian predictions together with a suitable unitarisation method. Our approach incorporates known theoretical constraints at low and high energies. The present experimental status, with partly conflicting data from different experiments, is discussed. Our analysis allows to resolve some experimental ambiguities, but better data are needed in order to determine the cross-section in the higher-energy range. Our best fits are used to determine the masses and widths of the relevant scalar resonances in this energy region.determine the resonance poles of the T matrix in the complex plane; this is worked out in section 7, where we compare results for the resonance masses and widths from different fits. Our conclusions are briefly summarised in section 8. To simplify the presentation, we refer to refs. [4][5][6][7][8][9] for details on the chiral formalism and notations, while some technical aspects and cumbersome formulae are relegated into appendices.
Chiral expansion for the Kπ scattering amplitudesUp to one loop in the chiral expansion the Kπ scattering amplitudes have been calculated by Bernard, Kaiser and Meißner [29] and resonance contributions have been included by the same authors in [30]. We shall just review the main expressions for the Kπ amplitudes to make our work selfcontained.Since the pion and the kaon have isospin 1 and 1/2 respectively, there exist two independent Kπ amplitudes T 1/2 Kπ and T 3/2 Kπ (in the following, for simplicity, we shall drop the subscript "Kπ"). The charge-two process K + π + → K + π + is purely I = 3/2 whereas the process K + π − → K + π − contains both I = 1/2 and I = 3/2 components. Both amplitudes depend on the Mandelstam variables s, t and u and are related by s ↔ u crossing. From this relation one finds 1