Speaker
Description
We extend chiral perturbation theory to include vector mesons as well as pions and nucleons. By counting the vector meson mass as heavy while treating the associated momentum as light, a consistent scheme can be obtained with a well-defined power counting rule. We find that the extended theory can describe the electric form factors of pions and nucleons far better than the conventional ChPT does, achieving the so-called vector-meson dominance in a systematic way. We then apply the theory to nuclear forces up to next-to-next-to-leading order (N2LO), which in general shows better accuracy, revealing the role of vector mesons in low-energy nuclear dynamics.