Chiral Expansion, Renormalization and the Nuclear Force

The renormalization of singular chiral potentials as applied to NN scattering and the structure of the deuteron is discussed. It is shown how zero range theories may be implemented non-perturbatively as constrained from known long range NN forces.Comment: Talk at International IUPAP Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics (FB18), Santos-Sao Paulo (Brasil), 21-26 August 200

Deuteron radial moments for renormalized chiral potentials

We calculate deuteron positive and negative radial moments involving any bilinear function of the deuteron S and D wave functions for renormalized OPE and TPE chiral potentials. The role played by the strong singularities of the potentials at the origin and the short distance insensitivity of the results when the potentials are fully iterated is emphasized as compared to realistic potentials.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. Poster presented at 4th International Conference on Quarks and Nuclear Physics (QNP06), Madrid, Spain, 5-10 Jun 200

Power Counting of Contact-Range Currents in Effective Field Theory

We analyze the power counting of two-body currents in nuclear effective field theories (EFTs). We find that the existence of non-perturbative physics at low energies, which is manifest in the existence of the deuteron and the 1S0 NN virtual bound state, combined with the appearance of singular potentials in versions of nuclear EFT that incorporate chiral symmetry, modifies the renormalization-group flow of the couplings associated with contact operators that involve nucleon-nucleon pairs and external fields. The order of these couplings is thereby enhanced with respect to the naive-dimensional-analysis estimate. Consequently, short-range currents enter at a lower order in the chiral EFT than has been appreciated up until now, and their impact on low-energy observables is concomitantly larger. We illustrate the changes in the power counting with a few low-energy processes involving external probes and the few-nucleon systems, including electron-deuteron elastic scattering and radiative neutron capture by protons.Comment: 5 pages. Minor revisions. Conclusions unchanged. Version to appear in Physical Review Letter

Renormalization Group Analysis of Boundary Conditions in Potential Scattering

We analyze how a short distance boundary condition for the Schrodinger equation must change as a function of the boundary radius by imposing the physical requirement of phase shift independence on the boundary condition. The resulting equation can be interpreted as a variable phase equation of a complementary boundary value problem. We discuss the corresponding infrared fixed points and the perturbative expansion around them generating a short distance modified effective range theory. We also discuss ultraviolet fixed points, limit cycles and attractors with a given fractality which take place for singular attractive potentials at the origin. The scaling behaviour of scattering observables can analytically be determined and is studied with some emphasis on the low energy nucleon-nucleon interaction via singular pion exchange potentials. The generalization to coupled channels is also studied.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figure