Virtual Compton Scattering and Generalized Polarizabilities of the Nucleon in Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory

The spin-independent part of the virtual Compton scattering (VCS) amplitude from the nucleon is calculated within the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory (HBChPT). The calculation is performed to third order in external momenta according to chiral power counting. The relation of the tree-level amplitudes to what is expected from the low-energy theorem is discussed. We relate the one-loop results to the structure coefficients of a low-energy expansion for the model-dependent part of the VCS amplitude recently defined by Fearing and Scherer. Finally we discuss the connection of our results with the generalized polarizabilities of the nucleon defined by Guichon, Liu and Thomas.