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An effective theory to treat the dense nuclear medium by the perturbative expansion method is proposed as a natural extension of the Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory (HBChPT). Treating the Fermi momentum scale as a separate scale of the system, we get an improved convergence and the conceptually clear interpretation. We compute the pion decay constant and the pion velocity in the nuclear medium, and find their characters different from what the usual HBChPT predicts. We also obtain the Debye screening scale at the normal nuclear matter density, and the damping scale of the pion wave. Those results indicate that the present theory, albeit its improvement over the HBChPT, has the limitation yet to go over to the medium of about 1.3 times of normal matter density due to the absence of the intrinsic density dependence of the coupling constants. We discuss how we overcome this limitation in terms of the renormalization method., Comment: 39 pages and 7 eps figures

Using heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory, we have calculated all the diagrams up to two-loop order which contribute to the S-wave pion self-energy in symmetric nuclear matter. Some subtleties related to the definition of pion fields are discussed. The in-medium pion mass is turned out to be increased by only (5 - 6) per cents in normal nuclear matter density, without any off-shell ambiguity., Comment: 9 pages with 3 eps figures

Heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory (HBChPT) is applied to the asymmetry $A_��$ in $\vec{n} + p \to d + ��$ at threshold, which arises due to the weak parity non-conserving interactions. Instead of appealing to Siegert's theorem, transition operators up to next-to-leading chiral order are derived and the corresponding amplitudes are evaluated with the Argonne $v_{18}$ wavefunctions. In addition to the impulse contribution, both parity-conserving and parity-non-conserving two-body one-pion-exchange diagrams appear up to this order. Our prediction for the asymmetry is $A_��= - 0.10 \hpiNN$, which is close to the Siegert's theorem based result, $A_��\simeq -0.11 \hpiNN$. This illustrates that HBChPT is effective in the parity-non-conserving physics., Discussions are extensively refined. To appear in Phys. Lett. B

The $pp\to pp��^0$ cross section near threshold is computed up to one-loop order including the initial and final state interactions using the hybrid heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory and the counting rule a la Weinberg. With the counter terms whose coefficients are fixed by the resonance-saturation assumption, we find that the one-loop contributions are as important as the tree-order contribution and bring the present theoretical estimation of the total cross section close to the experimental data. The short-ranged contributions are controlled by means of a cutoff, and a mild cutoff dependence is observed when all diagrams of the given chiral order are summed. To the order treated, however, the expansion is found to converge rather slowly, calling for further studies of the process., 12 pages, 4 figures

Based on the effective field theory previously formulated by us to accurately postdict all low-energy two-nucleon properties as well as predict certain electroweak transitions in heavy nuclei, we make parameter-free predictions for the polarized np capture process \vec{n}+\vec{p} --> d +\gamma presently being measured at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble. Other participants of this meeting are invited to make their own predictions using their preferred approaches and join the bet for the best prediction to confront the forthcoming experiment., Comment: 19 pages, sprocl.sty needed. Talk given by MR at the Workshop on "Nuclear Physics with Effective Field Theories," Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, February 25-26, 1999, to appear in World Scientific

The properties of low-energy neutron-proton systems are studied in an effective field theory where only nucleons figure as relevant degrees of freedom. With a finite momentum cut-off regularization scheme, we show that the large scattering lengths of the np systems do not spoil the convergence of the effective field theory, which turns out to be extremely successful in reproducing, with little cut-off dependence, the deuteron properties, the np 1S0 scattering amplitude and most significantly, the M1 transition amplitude entering into the radiative np capture process., Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, two eps figures, uses epsfig.sty and sprocl.sty. Invited talk at the APCTP Workshop on Astro-Hadron Physics, Seoul, Korea, October 1997

We develop a systematic chiral perturbation expansion for the calculation of meson-exchange currents in nuclei and apply the formalism to nuclear axial currents. We summarize the principal results of such a calculation to one loop order on nuclear axial-charge transitions which provides a strong support to the conjecture of ``chiral filter phenomenon" in nuclear medium. The use of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory enables us to obtain a remarkably simple result valid next to the leading order in chiral counting. The dominant role of a soft-pion exchange in axial-charge transitions in heavy nuclei is confirmed. An important, {\it albeit} indirect, consequence of our result on the empirically observed enhancement in axial-charge transitions in heavy nuclei is pointed out., Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX file, SNUTP 92-82