Vacuum Nucleon Loops and Naturalness

Abstract

Phenomenological studies support the applicability of naturalness and naive dimensional analysis to hadronic effective lagrangians for nuclei. However, one-baryon-loop vacuum contributions in renormalizable models give rise to unnatural coefficients, which indicates that the quantum vacuum is not described adequately. The effective lagrangian framework accommodates a more general characterization of vacuum contributions without reference to a Dirac sea of nucleons.

Comments: 15 pages, REVTeX 3.0 with epsf.sty, plus 2 figures. Reference added