Peripheral nucleon-nucleon scattering at next-to-next-to-leading order in SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory

TL;DR

This paper computes nucleon-nucleon scattering phase shifts and mixing angles using SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory up to third order, showing consistency with empirical data and previous SU(2) results.

Contribution

It provides the first complete calculation of $T$ matrices for nucleon-nucleon scattering at this order in SU(3) chiral perturbation theory, including error analysis.

Findings

Predictions align with empirical phase shifts and mixing angles.

Results are consistent with SU(2) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory.

Errors from low-energy constants are thoroughly analyzed.

Abstract

We calculate the complete $T$ matrices of the elastic nucleon-nucleon scattering up to third order in SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. The phase shifts with orbital angular momentum $L\geq 2$ and the mixing angles with $J\geq 2$ are evaluated by using low-energy constants that were extracted from the meson-baryon analysis. It turns out that our prediction is consistent with the empirical phase shifts and mixing angles data, and also the results from SU(2) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. The errors from the low-energy constants are analyzed in detail. Our calculation provides reliable evidence that the nucleon-nucleon interaction calculated in SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory leads to reasonable predictions.