Renormalization (and power counting) of effective field theories for the nuclear force

The most common scheme used to regularize the Lippman-Schwinger (LS) equation is to introduce a sharp or smooth regularizing function that suppresses the contributions from the potential matrix elements for momenta larger than a given cutoff scale, which separates high-energy/short-distance scales and low-energy/long-distance scales, thus eliminating the ultraviolet divergences in the momentum integrals. Then, one needs determine the strengths of the contact interactions, the so called low-energy constants (LEC), by fitting a set of low-energy scattering data. Once the LECs are fixed for a given cutoff, the LS equation can be solved to evaluate other observables. Such a procedure, motivated by Wilsons renormalization group, relies on the fundamental premise of EFT that physics at low-energy/long-distance scales is insensitive with respect to the details of the dynamics at high-energy/short-distance scales, i.e. the relevant high-energy/short- distance effects for describing the low-energy observables can be captured in the cutoff-dependent LECs. The NN interaction can be considered properly renormalized when the calculated observables are independent of the cutoff scale within the range of validity of the ChEFT or involves a small residual cutoff dependence due to the truncation of the chiral expansion. In the language of Wilsons renormalization group, this means that the LECs must run with the cutoff scale in such a way that the scattering amplitude becomes renormalization group invariant (RGI). Here we consider pionless EFT up to NNLO and chiral EFT up to NNLO and use a subtractive renormalization scheme to describe the NN scattering channels with. We fix the strength of the contact interactions at a reference scale, chosen to be the one the provides the best fit, and then evolve the driving terms with a non-relativistic Callan-Symanzik equation to slide the renormalization scale. By computing phase shift relative differences, we show that the method is RGI. We also discuss in detail the failure of the Weinberg power counting and propose an alternative scheme in which the chiral EFT improves properly when we move through the chiral expansion. (author)