  Electromagnetic polarizabilities are important parameters for understanding
the interaction between photons and hadrons. For pions these quantities are
poorly constrained experimentally since they can only be measured indirectly.
New experiments at CERN and Jefferson Lab are planned that will measure the
polarizabilities more precisely. Lattice QCD can be used to compute these
quantities directly in terms of quark and gluons degrees of freedom, using the
background field method. We present results for the electric polarizability for
two different quark masses, light enough to connect to chiral perturbation
theory. These are currently the lightest quark masses used in polarizability
studies.
