Peripheral nucleon-nucleon scattering at next-to-next-to-leading order in SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

We calculate the complete $T$ matrices of the elastic nucleon-nucleon scattering up to third order in SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. The phase shifts with orbital angular momentum $L\geq 2$ and the mixing angles with $J\geq 2$ are evaluated by using low-energy constants that were extracted from the meson-baryon analysis. It turns out that our prediction is consistent with the empirical phase shifts and mixing angles data, and also the results from SU(2) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. The errors from the low-energy constants are analyzed in detail. Our calculation provides reliable evidence that the nucleon-nucleon interaction calculated in SU(3) heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory leads to reasonable predictions.