Low-energy constants and relativity in peripheral nucleon-nucleon scattering

Abstract

In our recent works we derived a chiral $O(q^4)$ two-pion exchange nucleon-nucleon potential (TPEP) formulated in a relativistic baryon (RB) framework, expressed in terms of the so called low energy constants (LECs) and functions representing covariant loop integrations. We showed that the expansion of these functions in powers of the inverse of the nucleon mass reproduces most of the terms of the TPEP derived from the heavy baryon (HB) formalism, but such an expansion is ill defined and does not converge at large distances. In the present work we perform a study of the phase shifts in nucleon-nucleon ($NN$) scattering for peripheric waves ($L\geq 3$), which are sensitive to the tail of the potential. We assess quantitatively the differences between the RB and HB results, as well as variations due to different values of the LECs. By demanding consistency between the LECs used in $\pi N$ and $NN$ scattering we show how $NN$ peripheral phase shifts could constrain these values. We demonstrate that this idea, first proposed by the Nijmegen group, favors a smaller value for the LEC $c_3$ than the existing ones, when considering the TPEP up to order $q^4$ in the chiral expansion.