Effective Field Theory Description of the Pion Form Factor

Using our present knowledge on effective hadronic theories, short-distance QCD information, the $1\mathrm{/}{N}_C$ expansion, analyticity and unitarity, we derive an expression for the pion form factor, in terms of $m_{\pi },m_K,M_{\rho }$ and $f_{\pi }$. This parameter-free prediction provides a surprisingly good description of the experimental data up to energies of the order of 1 GeV.