Two-pion contribution to the muon magnetic moment

Abstract

The two-pion contribution to hadronic vacuum polarization can be extracted from tau decay data when isospin violating and radiative corrections are taken into account. When the dominant corrections are applied to the photon-inclusive decay of the tau into two pions, one obtains a shift (-12.0 +/- 2.6).10^{-10} for the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The shift appears to be too small to reconcile the determinations of hadronic vacuum polarization from existing tau and e+ e- data. The reliability of electromagnetic corrections in the photon-inclusive tau decay is examined.