Low energy scattering with a nontrivial pion

An earlier calculation in a generalized linear sigma model showed that the well-known current algebra formula for low energy pion-pion scattering held even though the massless Nambu Goldstone pion contained a small admixture of a two-quark two-antiquark field. Here we turn on the pion mass and note that the current algebra formula no longer holds exactly. We discuss this small deviation and also study the effects of a SU(3) symmetric quark mass type term on the masses and mixings of the eight SU(3) multiplets in the model. We calculate the s-wave scattering lengths, including the beyond current algebra theorem corrections due to the scalar mesons, and observe that the effect of the scalar mesons is to improve the agreement with experiment. In the process, we uncover the way in which linear sigma models give controlled corrections (due to the presence of scalar mesons) to the current algebra scattering formula. Such a feature is commonly thought to exist only in the nonlinear sigma model approach.