  We study the two-pion exchange potential at next-to-next-to-leading order in
chiral effective field theory. We propose a new cut-off scheme for the pion
loop integrals based on spectral function regularization. We show that this
method allows for a consistent implementation of constraints from pion-nucleon
scattering. It leads to a much improved description of the partial waves with
angular momentum l \geq 2 as compared to the calculation utilizing dimensional
regularization.
