Unification of the physics of nucleons and nuclei

I outline an ambitious program which aims to achieve a unified description of nucleon and nuclear properties based on one chiral effective field theory.Comment: 9 pp, 6 figs, plenary talk at 17th International IUPAP Conference on Few-body Problems in Physics, June 5-10, 2003, Durham, North Carolina, US

To bind or not to bind: The H-dibaryon in light of chiral effective field theory

We analyse the quark mass dependence of the binding energy of the H-dibaryon in the framework of chiral effective field theory. We show that the SU(3) breaking effects induced by the differences of the pertinent two-baryon thresholds (Lambda-Lambda, Xi-N, Sigma-Sigma) have a very pronounced impact that need to be incorporated properly in future lattice QCD simulations. We also point out that if the H-dibaryon is a two-baryon bound state, its dominant component is Xi-N rather than Lambda-Lambda, which is a consequence of the approximate SU(3) flavor symmetry of the two-baryon interactions.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; Results updated to the new H binding energy reported by NPLQCD, conclusions remain unchanged, several references adde

Deconstructing triplet nucleon-nucleon scattering

Nucleon-nucleon scattering in spin-triplet channels is analysed within an effective field theory where one-pion exchange is treated nonperturbatively. Justifying this requires the identification of an additional low-energy scale in the strength of that potential. Short-range interactions are organised according to the resulting power counting, in which the leading term is promoted to significantly lower order than in the usual perturbative counting. In each channel there is a critical momentum above which the waves probe the singular core of the tensor potential and the new counting is necessary. When the effects of one- and two-pion exchange have been removed using a distorted-wave Born approximation, the residual scattering in waves with L<=2 is well described by the first three terms in the new counting. In contrast, the scattering in waves with L>=3 is consistent with the perturbative counting, at least for energies up to 300 MeV. This pattern is in agreement with estimates of the critical momenta in these channels.Comment: 13 pages, RevTeX, 8 figures, minor clarifications adde

On the modification of the Efimov spectrum in a finite cubic box

Three particles with large scattering length display a universal spectrum of three-body bound states called "Efimov trimers''. We calculate the modification of the Efimov trimers of three identical bosons in a finite cubic box and compute the dependence of their energies on the box size using effective field theory. Previous calculations for positive scattering length that were perturbative in the finite volume energy shift are extended to arbitrarily large shifts and negative scattering lengths. The renormalization of the effective field theory in the finite volume is explicitly verified. Moreover, we investigate the effects of partial wave mixing and study the behavior of shallow trimers near the dimer energy. Finally, we provide numerical evidence for universal scaling of the finite volume corrections.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, published versio

The S-Wave Pion-Nucleon Scattering Lengths from Pionic Atoms using Effective Field Theory

The pion-deuteron scattering length is computed to next-to-next-to-leading order in baryon chiral perturbation theory. A modified power-counting is then formulated which properly accounts for infrared enhancements engendered by the large size of the deuteron, as compared to the pion Compton wavelength. We use the precise experimental value of the real part of the pion-deuteron scattering length determined from the decay of pionic deuterium, together with constraints on pion-nucleon scattering lengths from the decay of pionic hydrogen, to extract the isovector and isoscalar S-wave pion-nucleon scattering lengths, a^- and a^+, respectively. We find a^-=(0.0918 \pm 0.0013) M_\pi^{-1} and a^+=(-0.0034 \pm 0.0007) M_\pi^{-1}.Comment: 19 pages LaTeX, 7 eps fig

Improved analysis of neutral pion electroproduction off deuterium in chiral perturbation theory

Near threshold neutral pion electroproduction on the deuteron is studied in the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. We include the next-to-leading order corrections to the three-body contributions. We find an improved description of the total and differential cross section data measured at MAMI. We also obtain more precise values for the threshold S-wave multipoles. We discuss in detail the theoretical uncertainties of the calculation.Comment: 14 pp, 11 figs, uses svjour.cl

The Delta-resonance in a finite volume

We study the extraction of Delta-resonance parameters from lattice data for small quark masses, corresponding to the case of an unstable Delta. To this end, we calculate the spectrum of the correlator of two Delta-fields in a finite Euclidian box up-to-and-including O(epsilon^3) in the small scale expansion using infrared regularization. On the basis of our numerical study, we argue that the extraction of the parameters of the Delta-resonance (in particular, of the mass and the pion-nucleon-delta coupling constant) from the measured volume dependence of the lowest energy levels should be feasible.Comment: 20 pages, 8 postscript figure

Baryon Axial Charge in a Finite Volume

We compute finite-volume corrections to nucleon matrix elements of the axial-vector current. We show that knowledge of this finite-volume dependence --as well as that of the nucleon mass-- obtained using lattice QCD will allow a clean determination of the chiral-limit values of the nucleon and Delta-resonance axial-vector couplings.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Low Energy Constants from High Energy Theorems

New constraints on resonance saturation in chiral perturbation theory are investigated. These constraints arise because each consistent saturation scheme must map to a representation of the full QCD chiral symmetry group. The low-energy constants of chiral perturbation theory are then related by a set of mixing angles. It is shown that vector meson dominance is a consequence of the fact that nature has chosen the lowest-dimensional nontrivial chiral representation. It is further shown that chiral symmetry places an upper bound on the mass of the lightest scalar in the hadron spectrum.Comment: 11 pages TeX and mtexsis.te