Effective chiral theory of nucleon-nucleon scattering

We present a new chiral expansion scheme for the nucleon-nucleon scattering amplitude which preserves unitarity exactly. Our effective field theory builds on the power counting rules for 2-nucleon reducible diagrams proposed in \cite{lutz}. We evaluate the leading order terms of the isospin one scattering amplitude and elaborate in detail on the $^1S_0$ phase shift. Our chiral description of the $^1S_0$-phase shift does compete in quality with modern phenomenological nucleon-nucleon potentials. We describe elastic and inelastic scattering quantitatively up to laboratory energies of $E_{\rm lab} \simeq 600$ MeV.