Towards a relativistic formulation of baryon-baryon interactions in chiral perturbation theory

In this talk, we report on two recent studies of relativistic nucleon-nucleon and hyperon-nucleon interactions in covariant chiral perturbation theory, where they are constructed up to leading order. The relevant unknown low energy constants are fixed by fitting to the nucleon-nucleon and hyperon-nucleon scattering data. It is shown that these interactions can describe the scattering data with a quality similar to their next-to-leading order non-relativistic counterparts. These studies show that it is technically feasible to construct relativist baryon-baryon interactions, and in addition, after further refinements, these interactions may provide important inputs to {\it ab initio} relativistic nuclear structure and reaction studies and help improve our understanding of low energy strong interactions.