Muon capture in deuterium

Abstract

Model dependence of the capture rates of the negative muon capture in deuterium is studied starting from potential models and the weak two-body meson exchange currents constructed in the tree approximation and also from an effective field theory. The tree one-boson exchange currents are derived from the hard pion chiral Lagrangians of the N Δ π ρ ω a 1 system. If constructed in conjunction with the one-boson exchange potentials, the capture rates can be calculated consistently. On the other hand, the effective field theory currents, constructed within the heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory, contain a low energy constant d ˆ R that cannot be extracted from data at the one-particle level nor determined from the first principles. Comparative analysis of the results for the doublet transition rate allows us to extract the constant d ˆ R .