The nucleon-nucleon potential beyond the static approximation

Abstract

We point out that, due to the use of static nucleon propagators in Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory, the current calculations of the nucleon-nucleon potential miss certain contributions starting at two loops. These contributions give rise to contact interactions, which are both parametrically and numerically more important than the so called NNLO potentials. They show a peculiar dependence on the light quark masses, which should be taken into account when performing chiral extrapolations of lattice data. However, they do not appear to have an impact on phenomenology since they can be absorbed into redefinitions of unknown parameters which are usually fitted to data.