Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Meson Loop Contributions to Baryon Masses

Student: Marston Copeland

School: Clemson University

Mentored By: Wally MeInitchouk

We calculate the self-energies of the flavor SU(3) octet and decuplet baryons, using a relativistic chiral effective theory framework consistent with Lorentz and gauge invariance. This is evaluated using several different regularization prescriptions, including finite-range regularization, Pauli-Villars, and dimensional regularization. Each prescription is shown to yield the same leading nonanalytic behavior as the masses of the quarks go to zero, as expected in QCD. With the derived results a numerical study can be done to investigate the difference between self-energies of baryons in the SU(3) octet and decuplet, as well as the differences between each prescription.