Nuclear Chiral Axial Currents and Applications to Few-Nucleon Systems

Abstract

This Thesis is divided into three main parts. The first part discusses basic aspects of chiral effective field theory and the formalism, based on time ordered perturbation theory, used to to derive the nuclear potentials and currents from the chiral Lagrangians. The second part deals with the actual derivation, up to one loop, of the two-nucleon potential and one- and two-nucleon weak axial charge and current. In both derivations ultraviolet divergences generated by loop corrections are isolated using dimensional regularization. The resulting axial current is finite and conserved in the chiral limit, while the axial charge requires renormalization. A complete set of contact terms for the axial charge up to the relevant order in the power counting is constructed. The third part of this Thesis discusses two applications: (i) the calculation of the Gamow-Teller matrix element of tritium, used to constrain the single low-energy constant entering the axial current; (ii) the calculation of neutrino-deuteron inclusive cross sections at low energies. These results have confirmed previous predictions obtained in phenomenological approaches. These latter studies have played an important role in the analysis and interpretation of experiments at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.