SU(3) Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory and Long Distance Regularization∗

The use of SU(3) chiral perturbation theory in the analysis of low energy meson-baryon interactions is discussed. It is emphasized that short distance effects, arising from propagation of Goldstone bosons over distances smaller than a typical hadronic size, are modeldependent and lead to a lack of convergence in the SU(3) chiral expansion when regularized dimensionally. In this paper we demonstrate how to remove such effects in a chirally consistent fashion by use of a cutoff and demonstrate that such removal ameliorates convergence problems which arise from large loop effects. Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft