Ordinary Muon Capture in Hydrogen Reexamined

Abstract

The rate of muon capture in a muonic hydrogen atom is calculated in heavy-nucleon chiral perturbation theory up to next-to-next-to leading order. To this order, we present the systematic evaluation of all the corrections due to the QED and electroweak radiative corrections and the proton-size effect. Since the low-energy constants involved can be determined from other independent sources of information, the theory has predictive power. For the hyperfine-singlet $\mu p$ capture rate $\Gamma_0$, our calculation gives $\Gamma_0=710 \,\pm 5\,s^{-1}$, which is in excellent agreement with the experimental value obtained in a recent high-precision measurement by the MuCap Collaboration.