The eta' in baryon chiral perturbation theory

We include in a systematic way the eta' in baryon chiral perturbation theory. The most general relativistic effective Lagrangian describing the interaction of the lowest lying baryon octet with the Goldstone boson octet and the eta' is presented up to linear order in the derivative expansion and its heavy baryon limit is obtained. As explicit examples, we calculate the baryon masses and the pi N sigma-term up to one-loop order in the heavy baryon formulation. A systematic expansion in the meson masses is possible, and appearing divergences are renormalized.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

U(3) chiral perturbation theory with infrared regularization

We include the eta-prime in chiral perturbation theory without employing 1/N_c counting rules. The method is illustrated by calculating the masses and decay constants of the Goldstone boson octet (pions, kaons, eta) and the singlet eta-prime up to one-loop order. The effective Lagrangian describing the interactions of the eta-prime with the Goldstone boson octet is presented up to fourth chiral order and the loop integrals are evaluated using infrared regularization, which preserves Lorentz and chiral symmetry.Comment: 29 page

1/Nc Countings in Baryons

The $1/N_c$ power countings for baryon decays and configuration mixings are determined by means of a non-relativistic quark picture. Such countings are expected to be robust under changes in the quark masses, and therefore valid as these become light. It is shown that excited baryons have natural widths of ${\cal{O}}(N_c^0)$. These dominant widths are due to the decays that proceed directly to the ground state baryons, with cascade decays being suppressed to ${\cal{O}}(1/N_c)$. Configuration mixings, defined as mixings between states belonging to different $O(3)\times SU(2 N_f)$ multiplets, are shown to be sub-leading in an expansion in $1/\sqrt{N_c}$ when they involve the ground state baryons, while the mixings between excited states can be ${\cal{O}}(N_c^0)$.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure An omission that changes the conclusions on configuration mixings has been correcte

Large N_c, chiral approach to M_eta' at finite temperature

We study the temperature dependence of the eta and eta' meson masses within the framework of U(3)_L x U(3)_R chiral perturbation theory, up to next-to-leading order in a simultaneous expansion in momenta, quark masses and number of colours. We find that both masses decrease at low temperatures, but only very slightly. We analyze higher order corrections and argue that large N_c suggests a discontinuous drop of M_eta' at the critical temperature of deconfinement T_c, consistent with a first order transition to a phase with approximate U(1)_A symmetry.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures. 2 footnotes added, 1 reference changed and 1 typo corrected. To be published in Phys. Rev.

Large Mass Invariant Asymptotics of the Effective Action

We study the large mass asymptotics of the Dirac operator with a nondegenerate mass matrix m={diag}(m_1,m_2,m_3) in the presence of scalar and pseudoscalar background fields taking values in the Lie algebra of the U(3) group. The corresponding one-loop effective action is regularized by the Schwinger's proper-time technique. Using a well-known operator identity, we obtain a series representation for the heat kernel which differs from the standard proper-time expansion, if m_1\ne m_2\ne m_3. After integrating over the proper-time we use a new algorithm to resum the series. The invariant coefficients which define the asymptotics of the effective action are calculated up to the fourth order and compared with the related Seeley-DeWitt coefficients for the particular case of a degenerate mass matrix with m_1=m_2=m_3.Comment: 5 pages, revtex, no figure