Nuclear forces from chiral Lagrangians using the method of unitary transformation (I): Formalism

We construct the two- and three-nucleon potential based on the most general chiral effective pion-nucleon Lagrangian using the method of unitary transformations. For that, we develop a power counting scheme consistent with this projection formalism. In contrast to previous results obtained in old-fashioned time-ordered perturbation theory, the method employed leads to energy-independent potentials. We discuss in detail the similarities and differences to the existing chiral nucleon-nucleon potentials. We also show that to leading order in the power counting, the three-nucleon forces vanish lending credit to the result obtained by Weinberg using old-fashioned time-ordered perturbation theory. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.