MITP/18-108 November 14, 2018 Second-Order Leptonic Radiative Corrections for Lepton-Proton Scattering R.-D. Bucoveanu (a), H. Spiesberger (b);(c) (a) PRISMA Cluster of Excellence, Institut f¨urKernphysik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universit¨at, D-55099 Mainz, Germany (b) PRISMA Cluster of Excellence, Institut f¨urPhysik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universit¨at, D-55099 Mainz, Germany (c) Centre for Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, and Department of Physics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa E-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract The interpretation of high-precision lepton-nucleon scattering experiments requires the knowledge of higher-order radiative corrections. We present a calculation of the cross section for unpolarized lepton-proton scattering including leptonic radiative corrections up to second order, including one- and two-loop corrections, radiation of one and two photons and one- loop corrections for one-photon radiation. Numerical results are given for the planned P2 experiment at the MESA facility in Mainz, and some results are also discussed for Qweak and the suggested MUSE experiment. arXiv:1811.04970v1 [hep-ph] 12 Nov 2018 1 1 Introduction Lepton scattering has been, and continues to be, an extremely important experimental technique to study properties of matter. Elastic and inelastic electron nucleon scattering has allowed us to obtain information about form factors and structure functions or, at higher energies, parton distribution functions. Particularly interesting modern research topics include the investigation of the spin structure of the proton or the recently observed discrepancy in the determination of the proton charge radius between different experimental techniques. Precision measurements with polarized electrons are also used to study weak interactions.