SU(3) breaking and baryon magnetic moments

We show that the magnetic moments of the octet baryons can be fitted to an accuracy of 1.5 percent by a phenomenological Lagrangian in which SU(3) breaking corrections appear only linearly. This is in contrast to conventional chiral perturbation theory in which corrections non-analytic in SU(3) breaking dominate and tend to spoil the agreement with the data. Motivated by this observation, we propose a modified scheme for chiral perturbation theory that gives rise to a similar linear breaking of SU(3) symmetry. (Pacs 13.40.Em, 14.20.-c, 11.30.Rd)