Motivated by the fact that a polarized ${}^3$He nucleus behaves as an `effective neutron target, we examine manifestations of neutron electromagnetic polarizabilities in elastic Compton scattering from the Helium-3 nucleus. We calculate both unpolari
zed and double-polarization observables using chiral perturbation theory to next-to-leading order (${mathcal O}(e^2 Q)$) at energies, $omega leq m_{pi}$, where $m_{pi}$ is the pion mass. Our results show that the unpolarized differential cross section can be used to measure neutron electric and magnetic polarizabilities, while two double-polarization observables are sensitive to different linear combinations of the four neutron spin polarizabilities. [Note added in 2018] The qualitative conclusions and analytic formulae presented in this paper are correct, but several of the numerical results are wrong: see the erratum posted as arXiv:1804.01206 for further details. A full suite of corrected numerical results for cross sections and asymmetries can be found in Margaryan et al., arXiv:1804.00956. They can also be obtained as an interactive Mathematica notebook by emailing [email protected].
Several experimental investigations have observed parity violation in nuclear systems-a consequence of the weak force between quarks. We apply the $1/N_c$ expansion of QCD to the P-violating T-conserving component of the nucleon-nucleon (NN) potentia
l. We show there are two leading-order operators, both of which affect $vec{p}p$ scattering at order $N_c$. We find an additional four operators at $O(N_c^0 sin^2 theta_W)$ and six at $O(1/N_c)$. Pion exchange in the PV NN force is suppressed by $1/N_c$ and $sin^2 theta_W$, providing a quantitative explanation for its non-observation up to this time. The large-$N_c$ hierarchy of other PV NN force mechanisms is consistent with estimates of the couplings in phenomenological models. The PV observed in $vec{p}p$ scattering data is compatible with natural values for the strong and weak coupling constants: there is no evidence of fine tuning.
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 dat
a, 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.
We use nucleon-nucleon phase shifts obtained from experimental data, together with the chiral expansion for the long-distance part of the NN interaction, to obtain information about the short-distance piece of the NN potential that is at work in the
1S0 channel. We find that if the scale R that defines the separation between long- and short- distance is chosen to be lsim 1.8 fm then the energy dependence produced by short-distance dynamics is well approximated by a two-term polynomial for Tlab < 200 MeV. We also find that a quantitative description of NN dynamics is possible, at least in this channel, if one treats the long-distance parts of the chiral NN potential in perturbation theory. However, in order to achieve this we have to choose a separation scale R that is larger than 1.0 fm.
