Theory of pion-nucleus scattering lengths

We calculate the scattering lengths for pions on light nuclei, in a multiple scattering theory given earlier. We include all effects through second order in the pion-nucleon scattering amplitudes, using a simple nuclear model. We show how to calculate the binding corrections (BC) consistently, and find large cancellations between differentBC terms. The resulting scattering lengths are smaller than those obtained from measurements of pi-atomic level shifts. The size of the difference is consistent with the contribution of pion absorption, which we estimate.