The nucleon-nucleon system in chiral effective theory

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the reliability of chiral perturbation theory in modeling nucleon-nucleon interactions and demonstrates its effectiveness in predicting deuteron properties at low momentum transfer.

Contribution

It clarifies the conditions for applying chiral perturbation theory to NN scattering and provides precise predictions for deuteron form factors using this approach.

Findings

Chiral perturbation theory yields reliable NN phase shifts under certain conditions.

The approach produces accurate deuteron quadrupole and charge form factors for Q^2 < 0.25 GeV^2.

The expansion converges for cutoffs below 1 GeV.

Abstract

I discuss the conditions under which the application of chiral perturbation theory to the NN potential gives reliable results for NN scattering phase shifts. ChiPT also yields a convergent expansion for the deuteron charge operator. For cutoffs < 1 GeV, this produces precise predictions for deuterium's quadrupole and charge form factors in the range Q^2 < 0.25 GeV^2.