We calculate the magnetic form factor of the deuteron up to O(eP^4) in the chiral EFT expansion of the electromagnetic current operator. The two LECs which enter the two-body part of the isoscalar NN three-current operator are fit to experimental data, and the resulting values are of natural size. The O(eP^4) description of G_M agrees with data for momentum transfers Q^2 < 0.35 GeV^2.
The vector form factor of the pion is calculated in the framework of chiral effective field theory with vector mesons included as dynamical degrees of freedom. To construct an effective field theory with a consistent power counting, the complex-mass scheme is applied.
Spin polarization observables of the deuteron photodisintegration at low energies are studied in a pionless effective field theory up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). The total and differential cross sections, induced neutron polarization $P_{y}$, and tensor analyzing powers $T_{20}$ and $T_{22}$ of the process are calculated at photon energies from the breakup threshold to 20~MeV. We find that the NNLO corrections in the cross sections and $P_{y}$ converge well whereas they turn out to be important contributions in $T_{20}$ and $T_{22}$. We discuss the discrepancy between theory and experiment in $P_{y}$ still persisting as well as an implication of our result to the first measurement of $T_{20}$ at low energies in the HIGS facility.
We merge the dispersive relation approach and the ab initio method to compute nuclear structure corrections to the Lamb shift in muonic deuterium. We calculate the deuteron response functions and corresponding uncertainties up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory and compare our results to selected electromagnetic data to test the validity of the theory. We then feed response functions calculated over a wide range of kinematics to the dispersion-theory formalism and show that an improved accuracy is obtained compared to that with the use of available experimental data in the dispersive analysis. This opens up the possibility of applying this hybrid method to other light muonic atoms and supplementing experimental data with ab initio theory for kinematics where data are scarce or difficult to measure with the goal of reducing uncertainties in estimates of nuclear structure effects in atomic spectroscopy.
We discuss the current status of chiral effective field theory in the three-nucleon sector and present selected results for nucleon-deuteron scattering observables based on semilocal momentum-space-regularized chiral two-nucleon potentials together with consistently regularized three-nucleon forces up to third chiral order. Using a Bayesian model for estimating truncation errors, the obtained results are found to provide a good description of the experimental data. We confirm our earlier findings that a high-precision description of nucleon-deuteron scattering data below pion production threshold will require the theory to be pushed to fifth chiral order. This conclusion is substantiated by an exploratory study of selected short-range contributions to the three-nucleon force at that order, which, as expected, are found to have significant effects on polarization observables at intermediate and high energies. We also outline the challenges that will need to be addressed in order to push the chiral expansion of three-nucleon scattering observables to higher orders.
We calculate the form factors of the electromagnetic nucleon-to-$Delta$-resonance transition to third chiral order in manifestly Lorentz-invariant chiral effective field theory. For the purpose of generating a systematic power counting, the complex-mass scheme is applied in combination with the small-scale expansion. We fit the results to available empirical data.