SU(3) BREAKING AND BARYON MAGNETIC-MOMENTS

We show that the magnetic moments of the octet baryons can be fitted t o an accuracy of 1.5% by a phenomenological Lagrangian in which SU(3) breaking corrections appear only linearly. This is in contrast to conv entional chiral perturbation theory in which corrections non-analytic in SU(3) breaking dominate and tend to spoil the agreement with the da ta. Motivated by this observation, we propose a modified scheme for ch iral perturbation theory that gives rise to a similar linear breaking of SU(3) symmetry.