The Super-Heat-Kernel Expansion and the Renormalization of the Pion-Nucleon Interaction

A recently proposed super-heat-kernel technique is applied to heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory with two flavours. A previous result for the one-loop divergences of the pion-nucleon system is confirmed, giving at the same time an impressive demonstration of the efficiency of the new method. The cumbersome and tedious calculations of the conventional approach are now reduced to a few simple algebraic manipulations. The present computational scheme is not restricted to chiral perturbation theory, but can easily be applied or extended to any (in general non-renormalizable) theory with boson-fermion interactions.