Anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in a dispersive approach

Abstract: We present a new general dispersive formalism for evaluating the hadronic light-by-light scattering contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. In the suggested approach, this correction is related to the imaginary part of the muon's electromagnetic vertex function. The latter may be directly related to measurable hadronic processes by means of unitarity and analyticity. As a test we apply the introduced formalism to the case of meson pole exchanges and find agreement with the direct two-loop calculation.