Isospin Breaking in the Extraction of Isovector and Isoscalar Spectral Functions from e^+e^- --> hadrons

Abstract

A finite energy sum rule (FESR) analysis of the isospin-breaking vector current correlator <0|T(V^3_μV^8_ν)|0> is used to determine the isospin-breaking electromagnetic (EM) decay constants of the low-lying vector mesons. These results are used to evaluate the corrections required to extract the flavor diagonal 33 and 88 resonance contributions from the full resonance EM contributions to the EM spectral function. A large (~15%) correction is found in the case of the omega contribution to the isoscalar spectral function. The implications of these results for sum rules based on the isovector-isoscalar spectral difference are considered.