Generalized polarizabilities of the nucleon in baryon chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

The nucleon generalized polarizabilities (GPs), probed in virtual Compton scattering (VCS), describe the spatial distribution of the polarization density in a nucleon. They are accessed experimentally via the process of electron-proton bremsstrahlung ($ep\to ep\gamma$) at electron-beam facilities, such as MIT-Bates, CEBAF (Jefferson Lab), and MAMI (Mainz). We present the calculation of the nucleon GPs and VCS observables at next-to-leading order in baryon chiral perturbation theory (B$\chi$PT), and confront the results with the empirical information. At this order our results are predictions, in the sense that all the parameters are well-known from elsewhere. Within the relatively large uncertainties of our calculation we find good agreement with the experimental observations of VCS and the empirical extractions of the GPs. We find large discrepancies with previous chiral calculations---all done in heavy-baryon $\chi$PT (HB$\chi$PT)---and discuss the differences between B$\chi$PT and HB$\chi$PT responsible for these discrepancies.

25 pages, 11 figures, ReVTeX4, references updated, typos corrected, supplementary material (a Mathematica notebook) added, matches the published version

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Present and Future of QCD
• Measurement of the proton spin structure at long distances
• Measured proton electromagnetic structure deviates from theoretical predictions
• Forward doubly-virtual Compton scattering off the nucleon in chiral perturbation theory: the subtraction function and moments of unpolarized structure functions
• Measurement of the Generalized Polarizabilities of the Proton at Intermediate $Q^2$
• Measurement of the nucleon spin structure functions for 0.01<$Q^2$<1 GeV${}^2$ using CLAS
• The Proton Electromagnetic Generalized Polarizabilities