Chiral Analysis of the Nucleon Mass and Sigma Commutator

Abstract

Schemes for describing the light quark mass dependence of the nucleon mass calculated in lattice QCD are compared. The three schemes in consideration include a fully relativistic and Lorentz covariant scheme, one that is fully relativistic but not Lorentz covariant, and a semirelativistic scheme utilizing the heavy baryon approximation. Calculations of observables involving pseudoscalar meson loop diagrams generate nonanalytic terms proportional to square roots and logarithms of the quark mass. The three schemes all yield the correct model independent leading and next-to-leading nonanalytic terms of the chiral expansion of the baryon mass. Results for the masses of the other members of the octet are also presented. Here, low-energy coefficients of the analytic terms of the expansion for the nucleon and hyperons are constrained by lattice QCD results and are demonstrated to be independent of the renormalization scheme used. The differences in the leading coefficient of the chiral expansions are found to be consistent with strange quark counting. Using the schemes examined herein, we report results for the pion-nucleon sigma commutator based upon recent lattice results from the CLS Collaboration. We find $\sigma_{\pi N}=51.7 \pm 3.2 \pm 1.4$ MeV where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic respectively.