We study the perturbative renormalizability of chiral two-pion exchange for singlet and triplet channels within effective field theory, provided that the one-pion exchange piece of the interaction has been fully iterated. We determine the number of counterterms/subtractions needed to obtain finite results when the cutoff is removed, resulting in three counterterms for the singlet channel and six for the triplet. The results show that perturbative chiral two-pion exchange reproduce the data up to a center-of-mass momentum of $k~200–300$ MeV in the singlet channel and $k~300–400$ MeV in the triplet.

• Received 28 December 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.83.024003