Heavy-particle formalism with Foldy-Wouthuysen representation

Abstract

Utilizing the Foldy-Wouthuysen representation, we use a bottom-up approach to construct heavy-baryon Lagrangian terms, without employing a relativistic Lagrangian as the starting point. The couplings obtained this way feature a straightforward $1/m$ expansion, which ensures Lorentz invariance order by order in effective field theories. We illustrate possible applications with two examples in the context of chiral effective field theory: the pion-nucleon coupling, which reproduces the results in the literature, and the pion-nucleon-delta coupling, which does not employ the Rarita-Schwinger field for describing the delta isobar, and hence does not invoke any spurious degrees of freedom. In particular, we point out that one of the subleading $\pi N \Delta$ couplings used in the literature is, in fact, redundant, and discuss the implications of this. We also show that this redundant term should be dropped if one wants to use low-energy constants fitted from $\pi N$ scattering in calculations of $NN\to NN\pi$ reactions.