${{\mathit \pi}^{\pm}}$ CHARGE RADIUS INSPIRE search

The charge radius of the pion $\sqrt {\langle r{}^{2}_{{{\mathit \pi}}}\rangle }$ is defined in relation to the form factor of the pion electromagnetic vertex, called vector form factor VFF, F${}^{V}_{{{\mathit \pi}}}$. The VFF is a function of the squared four-momentum transfer $\mathit t$, or of the squared c.m. energy $\mathit s$, depending on the channel in which the photon exchange takes place. In both cases, it is related to the slope of the VFF at zero, namely

$\langle $r${}^{2}_{{{\mathit \pi}}}\rangle $ = 6 ${d F{}^{V}_{{{\mathit \pi}}}(\mathit q)\over d\mathit q}(\mathit q$=0) where $\mathit q$ = $\mathit t$, $\mathit s$.

The quantity cannot be measured directly. It can be extracted from the cross sections of three processes: pion electroproduction, ${{\mathit e}}$ ${{\mathit N}}$ $\rightarrow$ ${{\mathit e}}{{\mathit N}}{{\mathit \pi}}$, and pion electron scattering ${{\mathit e}}$ ${{\mathit \pi}}$ $\rightarrow$ ${{\mathit e}}{{\mathit \pi}}$, for the $\mathit t$ channel, and positron electron annihilation into two charged pions, ${{\mathit e}^{+}}$ ${{\mathit e}^{-}}$ $\rightarrow$ ${{\mathit \pi}^{+}}{{\mathit \pi}^{-}}$, for the $\mathit s$ channel. We encode all measurements, but we do not use electroproduction data in averaging because the extraction of the pion radius involves, in this case, theoretical uncertainties that cannot be controlled at the needed level of accuracy. In case of analyses based on the same data set, as ANANTHANARAYAN 2017 and COLANGELO 2019, which cannot be averaged, we combine the results into a common value, with the uncertainty range chosen to cover both analyses. Note that for consistency the form factor needs to be defined in both channels with the vacuum polarisation removed. For details see COLANGELO 2019 or Appendix B of ANANTHANARAYAN 2016A.