  Low-energy nuclear structure and reactions can be described in a
systematically improvable way using the framework of chiral effective field
theory. This requires solving the quantum mechanical many-body problem with
regularized nuclear forces and current operators, derived from the most general
effective chiral Lagrangian. To maintain the chiral and gauge symmetries, a
symmetry preserving cutoff regularization has to be employed when deriving
nuclear potentials. Here, we discuss various regularization techniques and show
how this task can be accomplished by regularizing the pion field in the
effective chiral Lagrangian using the gradient flow method. The actual
derivation of the nuclear forces and currents from the regularized effective
Lagrangian can be carried out utilizing the novel path-integral approach
introduced in our earlier paper.
