Towards a Relativistic Formulation of Baryon-baryon Interactions in Chiral Perturbation Theory

In this paper, we report on two recent studies of relativistic nucleon-nucleon and hyperonnucleon interactions in covariant chiral perturbation theory, where they are constructed up to leading order. The relevant unknown low energy constants are fixed by fitting to the nucleon-nucleon and hyperon-nucleon scattering data. It is shown that these interactions can describe the scattering data with a quality similar to their next-to-leading order non-relativistic counterparts. These studies show that it is technically feasible to construct relativist baryon-baryon interactions, and in addition, after further refinements, these interactions may provide important inputs to ab initio relativistic nuclear structure and reaction studies and help improve our understanding of low energy strong interactions.