Bakamjian-Thomas mass operator for the few-nucleon system: an effective theory approach

We present an exploratory study consisting in the formulation of a relativistic quantum mechanics to describe the few-nucleon system at low energy, starting from the quantum field theoretical chiral Lagrangian involving pions and nucleons. To this aim we construct a Bakamjian-Thomas mass operator and perform a truncation of the Fock space which respects at each stage the relativistic covariance. Such truncation is justified, at sufficiently low energy, in the framework of a systematic chiral expansion. As an illustration we discuss the low-energy phaseshifts of the nucleon-nucleon and pion-nucleon scattering.