Atomic binding corrections for high energy fixed target experiments

Abstract

High energy beams incident on a fixed target may scatter against atomic electrons. To a first approximation, one can treat these electrons as at rest. For precision experiments, however, it is important to be able to estimate the size of, and when necessary calculate, sub-leading corrections. We discuss atomic binding corrections to relativistic lepton-electron scattering. We analyze hydrogen in detail, before generalizing our analysis to multi-electron atoms. Using the virial theorem, and many-body sum rules, we find that the corrections can be reduced to measured binding energies, and the expectation value of a single one-body operator. We comment on the phenomenological impact for neutrino flux normalization and an extraction of hadronic vacuum polarization from elastic muon electron scattering at MUonE.

Comments: Slightly expanded discussion, matches journal version