Improving the convergence of SU(3) baryon chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

Baryon chiral perturbation theory as conventionally applied using dimensional regularization has a well-known problem with the convergence of the SU(3) chiral expansion. One can reformulate the theory equally rigorously using a momentum-space cutoff and we show that the convergence is thereby greatly improved for reasonable values of the cutoff. In effect, this is accomplished because the cutoff formalism removes the spurious physics of propagation at distance scales much smaller than the baryon size.