September 16, 2012
This is a pedagogical introduction to the treatment of quantum general relativity as an effective field theory. It starts with an overview of the methods of effective field theory and includes an explicit example. Quantum general relativity matches this framework and I discuss gravitational examples as well as the limits of the effective field theory. I also discuss the insights from effective field theory on the gravitational effects on running couplings in the perturbative ...
May 5, 2022
We derive a novel method for constructing effective field theories. Physically, the method is very close to the intuition behind effective field theories: One can integrate out the heavier scale directly from the path integral. We give a detailed recipe for the effective field theory construction, which is nearly identical to the construction of the so-called 1PI effective action. We also demonstrate the equivalence of the novel method to the commonly used procedure of matchi...
November 17, 2022
This is a review of some of the concepts and results of the effective field theory treatment of quantum general relativity. Included are lessons of low energy quantum gravity, and a discussion of the limits of effective field theory techniques.
June 4, 1996
These lectures introduce some of the basic ideas of effective field theories. The topics discussed include: relevant and irrelevant operators and scaling, renormalization in effective field theories, decoupling of heavy particles, power counting, and naive dimensional analysis. Effective Lagrangians are used to study the $\Delta S=2$ weak interactions and chiral perturbation theory.
April 16, 2018
Lecture notes from the 2017 Les Houches Summer School on Effective Field Theories. The lectures covered introductory material on EFTs as used in high energy physics to compute experimentally observable quantities. Other lectures at the school covered a wide range of applications in greater depth.
January 10, 2023
We take a tour through the past, present and future of Effective Field Theory, with applications ranging from LHC physics to cosmology.
February 13, 1995
I give a brief review of effective field theory, disscussing the contribution of Feza G\"ursey in particular and focusing on the literature I am most familiar with.
December 22, 1998
A brief introduction is given to the methods and spirit of effective lagrangians. The emphasis is on a summary of the overall picture, using a simple model as the vehicle to motivate and illustrate the main points. Powercounting is illustrated by estimating the size of the quantum corrections to the predictions of classical gravity.
August 13, 2009
This is a written version of the opening talk at the 6th International Workshop on Chiral Dynamics, at the University of Bern, Switzerland, July 6, 2009, to be published in the proceedings of the Workshop. In it, I reminisce about the early development of effective field theories of the strong interactions, comment briefly on some other applications of effective field theories, and then take up the idea that the Standard Model and General Relativity are the leading terms in a...
May 21, 2002
We present a simple introduction to the techniques of effective field theory (EFT) and their application to QCD. For problems with more than one energy scale, the EFT approach is a useful alternative to more traditional model-building strategies. The most relevant such problem for this discussion is that of making contact between QCD and the hadronic phase of matter. As a simple example, an EFT calculation of the bound states of hydrogen within QED is sketched. A more signifi...