Measurement of the charged-pion polarisability at COMPASS

<!--HTML-->For more than a decade, COMPASS has been tackling the measurement of the electromagnetic polarizability of the charged pion, which describes the stiffness of the pion against deformation in electromagnetic fields. Previous experiments date back to the 1980's in Serpukhov (Russia), where the Primakoff method for realizing interactions of charged pions with quasi-real photons was first employed. Later also other techniques in photon-nucleon and photon-photon collisions were carried out at different machines. The COMPASS measurement demonstrates that the charged-pion polarizability is significantly smaller than the previous results, roughly by a factor two, with the smallest uncertainties realized so far. The pion polarisability is of fundamental interest in the low-energy sector of quantum chromodynamics. It is directly linked to the quark-gluon substructure and dynamics of the pion, the lightest bound system of strong interaction.