Two-pion-exchange effects in the $pp\to pp\pi^0$ reaction

Abstract

We study the pp \to pp\pi^0 reaction near threshold based on heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory. We show that the two-pion-exchange diagrams give much larger contribution than the one-pion-exchange diagram which is of lower chiral order in Weinberg's counting scheme. We also discuss the relation of our results to the momentum counting scheme.