Reply to Comment on ``Determination of pion-baryon coupling constants from QCD sum rules''

In response to Kim's comment (nucl-th/9903040) on the sum rules for pion-baryon coupling constants obtained in hep-ph/9512259 and hep-ph/9606471, we point out that our treatment of the continuum is consistent with duality and with the fact that the correlator in the presence of an external meson or field should be represented by a double dispersion relation.Comment: 5 pages (RevTeX), reply to nucl-th/990304

A renormalisation-group approach to two-body scattering with long-range forces

We apply the renormalisation-group to two-body scattering by a combination of known long-range and unknown short-range forces. A crucial feature is that the low-energy effective theory is regulated by applying a cut-off in the basis of distorted waves for the long range potential. We illustrate the method by applying it to scattering in the presence of a repulsive 1/r^2 potential. We find a trivial fixed point, describing systems with weak short-range interactions, and a unstable fixed point. The expansion around the latter corresponds to a distorted-wave effective-range expansion.Comment: 4 pages (AIP style), talk presented at Mesons and Light Nuclei, Prague, 200

Power counting for three-body decays of a near-threshold state

We propose a new power counting for the effective field theory describing a near-threshold state with unstable constituents, such as the X(3872) meson. In this counting, the momenta of the heavy particles, the pion mass and the excitation energy of the unstable constituent -- the D* in the case of the X -- are treated as small scales, of order Q. The difference, delta, between the excitation energy of the D* and the pion mass is smaller than either by a factor ~20. We therefore assign delta an order Q^2 in our counting. This provides a consistent framework for a double expansion in both delta/m_pi and the ratio of m_pi to the high-energy scales in this system. It ensures that amplitudes have the correct behaviour at the three-body threshold. It allows us to derive, within an effective theory, various results which have previously been obtained using physically-motivated approximations.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; more discussion of pion exchange adde