On the Renormalization of the One-Pion Exchange Potential and the Consistency of Weinberg's Power Counting

Nogga, Timmermans and van Kolck recently argued that Weinberg's power counting in the few-nucleon sector is inconsistent and requires modifications. Their argument is based on the observed cutoff dependence of the nucleon-nucleon scattering amplitude calculated by solving the Lippmann-Schwinger equation with the regularized one-pion exchange potential and the cutoff I > varied in the range I > = 2 . . . 20 fm(-1). In this paper we discuss the role the cutoff plays in the application of chiral effective field theory to the two-nucleon system and study carefully the cutoff-dependence of phase shifts and observables based on the one-pion exchange potential. We show that (i) there is no need to use the momentum-space cutoff larger than I > similar to 3 fm(-1); (ii) the neutron-proton low-energy data show no evidence for an inconsistency of Weinberg's power counting if one uses I > similar to 3 fm(-1).