Electron-positron annihilation into four charged pions and the a₁-rho-pi Lagrangian

The excitation curve of e+e- annihilation into four charged pions in the rho(770) region is calculated using three existing models with rho mesons and pions in intermediate states supplemented by Feynman diagrams with the a_1(1260)pi intermediate states. A two-term phenomenological Lagrangian of the a_1-rho-pi interaction is used. The mixing angle is determined by fitting the e+e- --> pi+pi-pi+pi- cross section data of the Novosibirsk CMD-2 collaboration and also its combination with the low-energy part of the BaBar collaboration data. It is shown that the inclusion of the a_1-pi intermediate states succeeds in obtaining a good agreement with the data on both cross section and the rho^0 --> pi+pi-pi+pi- decay width. When moving to energies above 1 GeV, the rho(1450) and rho(1700) resonances are taken into account to get excellent agreement with the BaBar data over the full energy range up to 4.5 GeV.