Neutron electric polarizability

Abstract

We use the background field method to extract the "connected" piece of the neutron electric polarizability. We present results for quenched simulations using both clover and Wilson fermions and discuss our experience in extracting the mass shifts and the challenges we encountered when we lowered the quark mass. For the neutron we find that as the pion mass is lowered below $500\MeV$, the polarizability starts rising in agreement with predictions from chiral perturbation theory. For our lowest pion mass, $m_\pi=320\MeV$, we find that $\alpha_n = 3.8(1.3)\times 10^{-4}\fm^3$, which is still only one third of the experimental value. We also present results for the neutral pion; we find that its polarizability turns negative for pion masses smaller than $500\MeV$ which is puzzling.