A new order $\alpha$ correction to the decay rate of pionium

Abstract

Recently, much work has been devoted to the calculation of order $\alpha$ corrections to the decay rate of pionium, the ${\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ bound state. In previous calculations, nonrelativistic QED corrections were neglected since they start at order ${\alpha }^2$ in hydrogen and positronium. In this note, we point out that there is one correction which is actually of order $\alpha$ times a function of the ratio ${\mu }_r\alpha /m_e$, where ${\mu }_r$ is the reduced mass of the system. When ${\mu }_r\alpha \ll m_e$, this function can be Taylor expanded and leads to higher order corrections. When ${\mu }_r\alpha \approx m_e$, as is the case in pionium, the function is of order one and the correction is of order $\alpha$. We use an effective field theory approach to calculate this correction and find it equal to $0.4298\alpha {\Gamma }_0$. We also calculate the corresponding correction to the dimuonium (${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ bound state) decay rate and obtained a result in agreement with Jentschura et al.

Comments: 7 pages, 5 Postscript figures, uses Revtex V3.0 and epsf.tex