Revisiting the pion's scalar form factor in chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

The quark-connected and the quark-disconnected Wick contractions contributing to the pion's scalar form factor are computed in the two and in the three flavour chiral effective theory at next-to-leading order. While the quark-disconnected contribution to the form factor itself turns out to be power-counting suppressed its contribution to the scalar radius is of the same order of magnitude as the one of the quark-connected contribution. This result underlines that neglecting quark-disconnected contributions in simulations of lattice QCD can cause significant systematic effects. The technique used to derive these predictions can be applied to a large class of observables relevant for QCD-phenomenology.