Electromagnetic Polarisability of the Nucleon in Chiral Perturbation Theory

Abstract

We compute the polarisability of the nucleon to leading order in chiral perturbation theory. The contributions from kaons and baryon resonances as intermediate states are included in addition to the contribution from pions and nucleons that had been previously computed. The isoscalar operators are dominated by the infrared behaviour of pion loops giving rise to a $1/m_{\pi }$ coefficient. In contrast, the isovector operators are dominated by loops involving kaons, giving a $1/m_k$ coefficient, and further demonstrates that the strange quark is an important component of the nucleon. In addition, the inclusion of the decuplet of baryon resonances as intermediate states substantially modifies the result found from the octet baryons alone for the isoscalar polarisability.

Comments: 11 pages (uses harvmac, figures available upon request) , UCSD/PTH 92-30, QUSTH-92-04