Virtual photons in the pion form factors and the energy–momentum tensor Original Research Article

We evaluate the vector and scalar form factor of the pion in the presence of virtual photons at next-to-leading order in two-flavor chiral perturbation theory. We also consider the scalar and tensor pion form factors of the energy–momentum tensor. We find that the intrinsic electromagnetic corrections are very small for the vector as well as the charged pion scalar form factor. The scalar radius of the neutral pion is reduced by two percent. We perform infrared regularization by considering electron–positron annihilation into pions and the decay of a light Higgs boson into a pion pair. We discuss the detector resolution dependent contributions to the various form factors and pion radii.