FSR at leading and next-to-leading order in the radiative return at meson factories

The impact of final-state radiation (FSR) on the radiative return method for the extraction of the e+e- hadronic cross section is discussed in detail. Possible experimental tests of the model dependence of FSR are proposed for the pi+pi- hadronic final state. The importance of the (pi+pi-photon) final state contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment is investigated, and a method based on the radiative return is proposed to extract these contributions from data.