On the absence of fifth-order contributions to the nucleon mass in heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

(New version with some expanded discussion; figures and minor typos corrected.) We have calculated the contribution proportional to the fifth power of the pion mass in the chiral expansion of the nucleon mass in two flavour HBCPT. Only one irreducible two-loop integral enters, and this vanishes. All other corrections in the heavy-baryon limit can be absorbed in the physical pion-nucleon coupling constant which enters in the third order term, and so there are no contributions at fifth order. Including finite nucleon mass corrections, the only contribution agrees with the expansion of the relativistic one-loop graph in powers of the ration of the pion and nucleon masses, and is only 0.3% of the third order term. This is an encouraging result for the convergence of two-flavour heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory.