Weak hyperon decays in heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory: Renormalization and applications

The complete renormalization of the weak Lagrangian to chiral order q^2 in heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory is performed using heat kernel techniques. The results are compared with divergences appearing in the calculation of Feynman graphs for the nonleptonic hyperon decay Lambda -> p pi^- and an estimate for the size of the counterterm contributions to the s-wave amplitudes in nonleptonic hyperon decays is given.