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Hadronic Light-by-Light and the Pion Polarizability

We compute the charged pion loop contribution to the light-by-light scattering amplitude for off-shell photons in chiral perturbation theory through next-to-leading order (NLO). We show that NLO contributions are relatively more important due to a fortuitous numerical suppression of the leading-order (LO) terms. Consequently, one expects theoretical predictions for the hadronic light-by-light (HLBL) contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment, $a_μ^{HLBL}$, to be sensitive to the choice of model for the higher momentum-dependence of the LBL amplitude. We show that models employed thus far for the charged pion loop contribution to $a_μ^{HLBL}$ are not consistent with low-momentum behavior implied by quantum chromodynamics, having omitted potentially significant contributions from the pion polarizability.