Removing Pions from Two-Nucleon Effective Field Theory

Abstract

Two-nucleon effective field theory (EFT) beyond momenta of order the pion mass is studied for both cutoff regularization and dimensional regularization with power divergence subtraction (PDS). Models with two mass scales illustrate how effects of long-distance pion physics must be removed from the coefficients that encode short-distance physics. The modified effective range expansion shows that treating pions perturbatively, as in the PDS power counting, limits the radius of convergence of the EFT. Predictions from both regularization schemes with one-pion contributions are compared to data. The breakdown of the effective field theory occurs for momenta of order 300 MeV, even using the modified effective range expansion. This behavior is shown to be consistent with that expected from two-pion contributions.