Two-pion exchange contributions to the relativistic chiral nuclear force at N$^3$LO

Abstract

We present the two-pion exchange contributions to the nucleon-nucleon interaction up to next-to-next-to-next-to leading order (N$^3$LO) in covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory. Both one-loop and two-loop diagrams are calculated with the spectral functional regularization. We show that the phase shifts for partial waves with total angular momentum $3\le J\le 5$ are in better agreement with the partial wave analysis from the Nijmegen or the SAID group than their N$^2$LO counterparts. In addition, the relativistic chiral force exhibits better convergence than its non-relativistic counterpart, suggesting the importance of relativistic corrections.