Effective Field Theory in Nuclear Physics

I summarize the motivation for the effective field theory approach to nuclear physics, and highlight some of its recent accomplishments. The results are compared with those computed in potential models.

I review the current status of the application of effective field theory to nuclear physics, and its present implications for nuclear astrophysics.

An accurate description of nuclear matter starting from free-space nuclear forces has been an elusive goal. The complexity of the system makes approximations inevitable, so the challenge is to find a consistent truncation scheme with controlled errors. The virtues of an effective field theory approach to this problem are discussed.

Effective field theories have been developed for the description of light, shallow nuclei. I review results for two- and three-nucleon systems, and discuss their extension to halo nuclei.

We review the nuclear forces currently in use, i.e., the high-precision NN potentials of the 1990's and the nuclear two- and many-body forces based upon chiral effective field theory (EFT). We argue that the EFT approach is superior to any of the older schemes. Since accurate chiral forces are available now, the stage is set for microscopic nuclear structure to move into a new exciting era.

The Electromagnetic and Hadronic Physics sub-community of nuclear physics held a town hall meeting at Jefferson Lab during November 30 to December 4 of 2000. This is is our combined contribution to the white paper that will result from this meeting.

One of the central open problems in nuclear physics is the construction of effective interactions suitable for many-body calculations. We discuss a recently developed approach to this problem, where one starts with an effective field theory containing only fermion fields and formulated directly in a no-core shell-model space. We present applications to light nuclei and to systems of a few atoms in a harmonic-oscillator trap. Future applications and extensions, as well as chal...

There is growing interest in nuclear physics applications of effective field theory. I give a brief account of some of the latest developments in this area. I also describe interplay between this new approach and the traditional nuclear physics approach.

The study of nuclei predates by many years the theory of quantum chromodynamics. More recently, effective field theories have been used in nuclear physics to ``cross the border'' from QCD to a nuclear theory. We are now entering the second decade of efforts to develop a perturbative theory of nuclear interactions using effective field theory. This work describes the current status of these efforts.

Understanding the properties of atomic nuclei and nuclear dynamics from QCD remains a major challenge. Complementary to first attempts along these lines based on lattice QCD, an effective field theory approach has been developed in the past two decades and applied to a variety of nuclear bound states and reactions. I outline the foundations of this method, review selected applications and address some open challenges in this field.