Towards a perturbative theory of nuclear forces

NT@UW-01-06 LBNL 47692 RBRC-186 Towards a Perturbative Theory of Nuclear Forces S.R. Beane a , P.F. Bedaque b , M.J. Savage a,c , and U. van Kolck d,e arXiv:nucl-th/0104030 v1 9 Apr 2001 a Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 b Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 c Jefferson Laboratory, 12000 Jefferson Avenue, Newport News, VA 23606 Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 d e RIKEN-BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973 Abstract We show that an expansion of nuclear forces about the chiral limit is formally consistent and is equivalent to KSW power counting in the 1 S 0 channel and Weinberg power counting in the 3 S 1 − 3 D 1 coupled channels. Numerical evidence suggests that this expansion converges. The feasibility of making contact between nuclear physics and lattice-QCD simulations is discussed.