Baryon Masses at Second Order in Chiral Perturbation Theory

Abstract

We analyze the baryon mass differences up to second order in chiral perturbation theory, including the effects of decuplet intermediate states. We show that the Coleman--Glashow relation has computable corrections of order $(m_d-m_u)m_s$. These corrections are numerically small, and in agreement with the data. We also show that corrections to the $\Sigma$ equal-spacing rule are dominated by electromagnetic contributions, and that the Gell-Mann--Okubo formula has non-analytic corrections of order $m_s^2\ln m_s$ which cannot be computed from known matrix elements. We also show that the baryon masses cannot be used to extract model-independent information about the current quark masses.

Comments: 11 pages, 1 uu-encoded figure, LBL-34779, UCB-PTH-93/28