Quantifying the breakdown scale of pionless effective field theory
A. Ekström, Lucas Platter · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024
We use Bayesian statistics to infer the breakdown scale of pionless effective field theory in its standard power counting and with renormalization of observables carried out using the power-divergence subtraction scheme and cutoff regularization. We condition our inference on predictions of the total neutron-proton scattering cross section up next-to-next-to leading order. We quantify a median breakdown scale of approximately 1.4$m_π$. The 68% degree of belief interval is $[0.96,1.69]m_π$. This result confirms the canonical expectation that the pion mass is a relevant scale in low-energy nuclear physics.