Leading order relativistic chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction

Motivated by the successes of relativistic theories in studies of atomic/molecular and nuclear systems and the need for a relativistic chiral force in relativistic nuclear structure studies, we explore a new relativistic scheme to construct the nucleon-nucleon interaction in the framework of covariant chiral effective field theory. The chiral interaction is formulated up to leading order with covariant power counting and a Lorentz invariant chiral Lagrangian. We find that the relativistic scheme induces all six spin operators needed to describe the nuclear force. A detailed investigation of the partial wave potentials shows a better description of the ¹S₀ and ³P₀ phase shifts than the leading order Weinberg approach, and similar to that of the next-to-leading order Weinberg approach. For the other partial waves with angular momenta J ≥ 1, the relativistic results are almost the same as their leading order non-relativistic counterparts.