Deconstructing 1S0 nucleon-nucleon scattering

A distorted-wave method is used to analyse nucleon-nucleon scattering in the ¹ S ₀ channel. Effects of one-pion exchange are removed from the empirical phase shift to all orders by using a modified effective-range expansion. Two-pion exchange is then subtracted in the distorted-wave Born approximation, with matrix elements taken between scattering waves for the one-pion exchange potential. The residual short-range interaction shows a very rapid energy dependence for kinetic energies above about 100MeV, suggesting that the breakdown scale of the corresponding effective theory is only 270MeV. This may signal the need to include the D Delta -resonance as an explicit degree of freedom in order to describe scattering at these energies. An alternative strategy of keeping the cutoff finite to reduce large, but finite, contributions from the long-range forces is also discussed.