Two-photon exchange corrections to the pion form factor

Abstract

We compute two-photon exchange corrections to the electromagnetic form factor of the pion, taking into account the finite size of the pion. Compared to the soft-photon approximation for the infrared divergent contribution which neglects hadron structure effects, the corrections are found to be < 1% for small Q^2 (Q^2 < 0.1 GeV^2), but increase to several percent for Q^2 > 1 GeV^2 at extreme backward angles.

Comments: 9 pages, 4 figures, version to appear in Phys. Rev. C