Toward consistent nuclear interactions from chiral Lagrangians. II. Symmetry preserving regularization

Low-energy nuclear structure and reactions can be described in a systematically improvable way using the framework of chiral effective field theory. This requires solving the quantum mechanical many-body problem with regularized nuclear forces and current operators, derived from the most general effective chiral Lagrangian. To maintain the chiral and gauge symmetries, a symmetry preserving cutoff regularization has to be employed when deriving nuclear potentials. Here, we discuss various regularization techniques and show how this task can be accomplished by regularizing the pion field in the effective chiral Lagrangian using the gradient flow method. The actual derivation of the nuclear forces and currents from the regularized effective Lagrangian can be carried out utilizing the novel path-integral approach introduced in our earlier paper.