Paper detail

Virtual photon-photon scattering

Based on analyticity, unitarity, and Lorentz invariance the contribution from hadronic vacuum polarization to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is directly related to the cross section of e^+e^- --> hadrons. We review the main difficulties that impede such an approach for light-by-light scattering and identify the required ingredients from experiment. Amongst those, the most critical one is the scattering of two virtual photons into meson pairs. We analyze the analytic structure of the process gamma^* gamma^* --> pi pi and show that the usual Muskhelishvili-Omnes representation can be amended in such a way as to remain valid even in the presence of anomalous thresholds.