Spin polarisability of the nucleon at NLO in the chiral expansion

Abstract

We present a calculation of the fourth-order (NLO) contribution to spin-dependent forward Compton scattering in heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory. No low-energy constants, except for the anomalous magnetic moments of the nucleon, enter at this order. The fourth-order piece of the spin polarisability of the proton turns out to be almost twice the size of the leading piece, with the opposite sign. This leads to the conclusion that no prediction can currently be made for this quantity.