Lattice QCD constraints on pion electroproduction off a nucleon

Abstract

Very recently, a lattice QCD collaboration has explored threshold pion electroproduction near the physical pion mass and has simulated the relevant multipole amplitudes. Different multipole amplitudes are usually entangled in experimental data, and thus extracting each of them independently from first principles provides additional essential constraints on phenomenological theories. We use nonperturbative Hamiltonian theory to investigate the electroproduction process, providing an advanced approach with additional two-particle coupled channels to acquire the physical electric dipole amplitudes from the original lattice QCD data. We note that future lattice QCD simulations of the electric dipole amplitudes at higher energies will be much closer to their physical counterparts than the current ones near threshold. In addition, we obtain a new expression which, like that of Lellouch-L\"uscher, depends only on the final-state interactions but provides both the real and imaginary parts of the transition amplitudes.