Exclusive measurement of the eta -> pi(+) pi(-) gamma decay

An exclusive measurement of the decay eta -> pi(+) pi(-) gamma has been performed at the WASA facility at COSY. The eta mesons were produced in the fusion reaction pd -> He-3 X at a proton beam momentum of 1.7 GeV/c. Efficiency corrected differential distributions have been extracted based on 13 960 +/- 140 events after background subtraction. The measured pion angular distribution is consistent with a relative p-wave of the two-pion system, whereas the measured photon energy spectrum was found at variance with the simplest gauge invariant matrix element of eta -> pi(+) pi(-) gamma. A parameterization of the data can be achieved by the additional inclusion of the empirical pion vector form factor multiplied by a first-order polynomial in the squared invariant mass of the pi(+) pi(-) system. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.