Does chiral nuclear theory work as well as physicists claim?

Nuclear physicists use chiral effective field theory to describe how two nucleons interact, but the math requires careful regularization to avoid infinities. Using a statistical bootstrap technique borrowed from machine learning, the team tested whether the leading-order and next-to-leading-order approximations actually match experimental data from the Granada phase-shift analysis. The NLO version extends the valid energy range significantly, suggesting the expansion converges better than previously established.