Radiative Muon Capture by a Proton in Chiral Perturbation Theory

Abstract

The first measurement of the radiative muon capture (RMC) rate on a proton was recently carried out at TRIUMF. The TRIUMF group analyzed the RMC rate in terms of the theoretical formula of Beder and Fearing, and found the surprising result that the pseudoscalar coupling g_P is 1.5 times the value expected from PCAC. To assess the reliability of the theoretical framework used by the TRIUMF group to relate the RMC rate to the pseudoscalar form factor, we calculate the RMC rate in chiral perturbation theory, which provides a systematic framework to describe all the vertices involved in RMC, fulfilling gauge-invariance and chiral-symmetry requirements in a transparent manner. As a first step we present a chiral perturbation calculation at tree level which includes sub-leading order terms.