Effective chiral theory of nucleon-nucleon scattering

We present a new chiral expansion scheme for the nucleon-nucleon scattering amplitude which preserves unitarity exactly. Our effective field theory builds on the power counting rules for 2-nucleon reducible diagrams. We evaluate the leading order terms of the isospin one scattering amplitude and elaborate in detail on the S-1(0) phase shift. Our chiral description of the S-1(0)-phase shift does compete in quality with modern phenomenological nucleon-nucleon potentials. We describe elastic and inelastic scattering quantitatively up to laboratory energies of E-lab similar or equal to 600 MeV. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.