Eur. Phys. J. C (2005) 39: 411-420
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s2004-02103-1

theoretical physics

Radiative return at - and B-factories: FSR for muon pair production at next-to-leading order

¹ Institute of Physics, University of Silesia, 40007, Katowice, Poland
² Institut für Theoretische Teilchenphysik, Universität Karlsruhe, 76128, Karlsruhe, Germany
³ Department of Physics, Theory Division, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
⁴ Instituto de Física Corpuscular, 46071, Valencia, Spain

^* e-mail: czyz@us.edu.pl

Abstract

Muon pair production through the radiative return is of importance for a measurement of the hadronic production cross section in two ways: it provides an independent calibration and it may give rise to an important background for the measurement of the pion form factor. With this motivation the Monte Carlo event generator PHOKHARA is extended to include next-to-leading order radiative corrections to the reaction . Furthermore, virtual ISR corrections to FSR from pions are introduced, which extends the applicability of the generator into a new kinematical regime. Finally, the effect of photon vacuum polarization is introduced into this new version of the generator.