Ph.D. Thesis: Chiral Effective Field Theory Beyond the Power-Counting Regime

Abstract

Novel techniques are presented, which identify the power-counting regime (PCR) of chiral effective field theory, and allow the use of lattice quantum chromodynamics results that extend outside the PCR. By analyzing the renormalization of low-energy coefficients of the chiral expansion of the nucleon mass, the existence of an optimal regularization scale is realized. The techniques developed for the nucleon mass renormalization are then applied to a test case: performing a chiral extrapolation without prior phenomenological bias. The robustness of the procedure for obtaining an optimal regularization scale and performing a reliable chiral extrapolation is confirmed. The procedure developed is then applied to the magnetic moment and the electric charge radius of the nucleon. The consistency of the results for the value of the optimal regularization scale provides strong evidence for the existence of an intrinsic energy scale in the nucleon-pion interaction.

180 pages, 117 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Chiral Perturbation Theory and Baryon Properties
• Nucleon sigma term and strange quark content from lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry
• Cutoff schemes in chiral perturbation theory and the quark mass expansion of the nucleon mass
• Chiral extrapolation of nucleon magnetic form factors
• A Chiral Perturbation Theory Primer
• Recent results on nucleon sigma terms in lattice QCD
• Chiral expansion of the nucleon mass to order q^6
• Convergence of the chiral expansion for the nucleon mass