Measurement of the charged-pion polarizability

Chiral symmetry breaking: Current experimental status and prospects

Chiral symmetry, linked to the smallness of the quark masses compared to the QCD bound states, and its breaking pattern are exploited in effective field theory to describe a multitude of phenomena by a few low-energy constants. Those concern light-meson dynamics and decays, their couplings to photons and meson-nucleon interactions. Special emphasis is given to the pion properties, in terms of pion-pion low-energy scattering, the pion polarizability and the chiral anomaly, which describes the coupling of three pions to a photon. These properties are studied by the COMPASS collaboration at CERN since first data taking with pion beams in the year 2004, and several following campaigns. In the framework of the upcoming AMBER collaboration, it is planned to extend the studies to the kaon sector.

Dispersion relations for hadronic light-by-light and the muon g − 2

The largest uncertainties in the Standard Model calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (g−2)µ come from hadronic effects, namely hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) and hadronic lightby-light (HLbL) contributions. Especially the latter is emerging as a potential roadblock for a more accurate determination of (g−2)µ. The main focus here is on a novel dispersive description of the HLbL tensor, which is based on unitarity, analyticity, crossing symmetry, and gauge invariance. This opens up the possibility of a data-driven determination of the HLbL contribution to (g−2)µ with the aim of reducing model dependence and achieving a reliable error estimate.

Our dispersive approach defines unambiguously the pion-pole and the pion-box contribution to the HLbL tensor. Using Mandelstam double-spectral representation, we have proven that the pion-box contribution coincides exactly with the one-loop scalar-QED amplitude, multiplied by the appropriate pion vector form factors. Using dispersive fits to high-statistics data for the pion vector form factor, we obtain $ \alpha _\mu ^{\pi {\rm{ - box}}} = - 15.9(2) \times {10^{ - 11}} $. A first model-independent calculation of effects of ππ intermediate states that go beyond the scalar-QED pion loop is also presented. We combine our dispersive description of the HLbL tensor with a partial-wave expansion and demonstrate that the known scalar-QED result is recovered after partial-wave resummation. After constructing suitable input for the γ*γ* → ππ helicity partial waves based on a pion-pole left-hand cut (LHC), we find that for the dominant charged-pion contribution this representation is consistent with the two-loop chiral prediction and the COMPASS measurement for the pion polarizability. This allows us to reliably estimate S-wave rescattering effects to the full pion box and leads to $ \alpha _\mu ^{\pi {\rm{ - box}}} + \alpha _{\mu ,J = 0}^{\pi \pi ,\pi {\rm{ - pole}}\,{\rm{LHC}}} = - 24(1) \times {10^{ - 11}} $.

Considerations for an In Vitro, Cell-Based Testing Platform for Detection of Adverse Drug-Induced Inotropic Effects in Early Drug Development. Part 1: General Considerations for Development of Novel Testing Platforms

Drug-induced effects on cardiac contractility can be assessed through the measurement of the maximal rate of pressure increase in the left ventricle (LVdP/dt_max) in conscious animals, and such studies are often conducted at the late stage of preclinical drug development. Detection of such effects earlier in drug research using simpler, in vitro test systems would be a valuable addition to our strategies for identifying the best possible drug development candidates. Thus, testing platforms with reasonably high throughput, and affordable costs would be helpful for early screening purposes. There may also be utility for testing platforms that provide mechanistic information about how a given drug affects cardiac contractility. Finally, there could be in vitro testing platforms that could ultimately contribute to the regulatory safety package of a new drug. The characteristics needed for a successful cell or tissue-based testing platform for cardiac contractility will be dictated by its intended use. In this article, general considerations are presented with the intent of guiding the development of new testing platforms that will find utility in drug research and development. In the following article (part 2), specific aspects of using human-induced stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes for this purpose are addressed.

COMPASS: meson spectroscopy and low-energy meson dynamics

Within the broad physics programme of the COMPASS collaboration at CERN SPS, soft reactions of high-energy hadron beams on different nuclear targets are investigated. Aiming at a better understanding of the strong interaction, novel results range from tests of chiral symmetry breaking to properties of diffractively produced meson resonances studied in their multi-particle decays, such as the a1(1420) with unusual properties. The talk will highlight the challenges of the employed experimental techniques, and as well of the analysis methods, that are developed to a large extent along with the analysis of the world’s largest data sets in the field.

On the Hadronic light-by-light contribution to the muon g – 2

This talk is about the hadronic light-by-light contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment, mainly our old work but including some newer results as well. It concentrates on the model calculations. Most attention is paid to pseudo-scalar exchange and the pion loop contribution. Scalar, a1-exchange and other contributions are shortly discussed as well. For the π0-exchange a possible large cancellation between connected and disconnected diagrams is expected.