Applicability of Perturbative QCD to Pion Virtual Compton Scattering

Abstract

We study explicitly the applicability of perturbative QCD (pQCD) to the pion virtual Compton scattering. It is found that there are central-region singularities introduced by the QCD running coupling constant, in addition to the end-point singularities generally existed in other exclusive processes such as the pion form factor. We introduce a simple technique to evaluate the contributions from these singularities, so that we can arrive at a judgement that these contributions will be unharmful to the applicability of pQCD at certain energy scale, i.e., the ``work point'' which is defined to determine when pQCD is applicable to exclusive processes. The applicability of pQCD for different pion distribution amplitudes are explored in detail. We show that pQCD begins to work at 10 ${GeV}^2$. If we relax our constraint to a weak sense, the work point may be as low as 4 ${GeV}^2$.