Improving the ultraviolet behavior in baryon chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

We introduce a new formulation of baryon chiral perturbation theory which improves the ultraviolet behavior of propagators and can be interpreted as a smooth cutoff regularization scheme. It is equivalent to the standard approach, preserves all symmetries and therefore satisfies the Ward identities. Our formulation is equally well defined in the vacuum, one- and few-nucleon sectors of the theory. The equations (Bethe-Salpeter, Lippmann-Schwinger, etc.) for the scattering amplitudes of the few-nucleon sector are free of divergences in the new approach. Unlike the usual cutoff regularization, our 'cutoffs' are parameters of the Lagrangian and do not have to be removed.

19 pages, 3 figures, REVTeX 4; version to be published in Phys. Rev. D, additional section on issues of renormalization in few-body sector included