Chiral enhancement in soft-photon bremsstrahlung and charge asymmetry in low-energy lepton-proton scattering

Abstract: We carry out a Lorentz gauge evaluation of the single-soft photon bremsstrahlung radiative corrections to the unpolarized elastic lepton-proton scattering cross section at low energies using the framework of heavy baryon chiral effective field theory (HB$\chi$PT). We systematically incorporate all next-to-leading order [i.e., ${\mathcal O}(\alpha^3/M)$] contributions to the cross section arising from radiative and proton's low-energy recoil effects. An important component of the soft-photon bremsstrahlung corrections arises from the interference between lepton and proton bremsstrahlung processes, which are characterized as charge-odd. We identify a class of Feynman diagrams involving the final-state radiating proton that induces a chiral enhancement, thereby modifying the naive amplitude hierarchy based on the standard chiral power-counting scheme. The recently derived HB$\chi$PT result for the analytically computed exact two-photon exchange (TPE) counterpart at NLO is combined with our charge-odd soft-photon bremsstrahlung contribution to yield the complete charge-odd radiative correction. By incorporating the leading hadronic correction to the leading order Born one-photon exchange (OPE) process within the charge-even radiative correction, we obtain a prediction for the charge asymmetry observable, which can be compared with forthcoming MUSE data on elastic lepton-anti-lepton scattering off the proton. In all our calculations, we use finite lepton masses.