Hard pion bremsstrahlung in the Coulomb region

Abstract

Hard high-energy pion-nucleus bremsstrahlung, $\pi^- +A\to\pi^- +\gamma +A$, is studied in the Coulomb region, i.e. the small-angle region where the nuclear scattering is dominated by the Coulomb interaction. Special attention is focussed on the possibility of measuring the pion polarizability in such reactions. We study the sensitivity to the structure of the underlying the pion-Compton amplitude through a model with $\sigma$, $\rho$, and a_1 exchanges. It is found that the effective energy in the virtual pion-Compton scattering is often so large that the threshold approximation does not apply.