Estimates of isospin breaking contributions to baryon masses

Abstract

We estimate the isospin breaking contributions to the baryon masses which we analyzed recently using a loop expansion in the heavy baryon approximation to chiral effective field theory. To one loop, the isospin breaking corrections come from the effects of the $d, u$ quark mass difference, the Coulomb and magnetic moment interactions, and effective point interactions attributable to color-magnetic effects. The addition of the first meson loop corrections introduces new structure. We estimate the resulting low-energy, long-range contributions to the mass splittings by regularizing the loop integrals using connections to dynamical models for finite-size baryons. We find that the resulting contributions to the isospin breaking corrections are of the right general size, have the correct sign pattern, and agree with the experimental values within the margin of error.