Effective Field Theory in Nuclear Physics

Effective field theories are recognized nowadays as the framework to describe low-energy nuclear structure and reactions consistently with the underlying theory of the strong interactions, QCD. It was not always so. As we celebrate the 30 years of the first publications, I collect here some memories from those early days. I also discuss some of the key issues that were raised back then and, despite all progress, are still with us. Dedicated to the memory of Steven Weinberg, w...

Three lectures on effective field theory given at the Seventh Summer School in Nuclear Physics, Seattle June 19-30 1995.

These are the proceedings of the workshop on ``Effective Field Theories in Nuclear, Particle and Atomic Physics'' held at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, Bad Honnef, Germany from December 13 to 17, 2005. The workshop concentrated on Effective Field Theory in many contexts. A first part was concerned with Chiral Perturbation Theory in its various settings and explored strongly its use in relation with lattice QCD. The second part consis...

These are the proceedings of the international workshop on "Nuclear Dynamics with Effective Field Theories" held at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany from July 1 to 3, 2013. The workshop focused on effective field theories of low-energy QCD, chiral perturbation theory for nuclear forces as well as few- and many-body physics. Included are a short contribution per talk.

The accurate theoretical treatment of low-energy electro-weak processes in lightest nuclei is of great current importance not only in the context of nuclear physics {\it per se} but also from the astrophysical and particle-physics viewpoints. I give a brief survey of the recent remarkable progress in this domain.

In these lectures I first explain, in a rather basic fashion, the construction of effective field theories. I then discuss some recent developments in the application of such theories to two- and three-nucleon systems.

This review gives an overview of effective field theory (EFT) as applied at finite density, with a focus on nuclear many-body systems. Uniform systems with short-range interactions illustrate the ingredients and virtues of many-body EFT and then the varied frontiers of EFT for finite nuclei and nuclear matter are surveyed.

Effective field theory allows for a systematic and model-independent derivation of the forces between nucleons in harmony with the symmetries of Quantum Chromodynamics. We review the foundations of this approach and discuss its application for light nuclei at various resolution scales. The extension of this approach to many-body systems is briefly sketched.

High-precision calculations of electroweak processes in light nuclei are of great importance for multiple reasons. Gerry Brown together with Dan-Olof Riska published in 1972 a famous calculation on radiative capture of a thermal neutron on a proton, and their work was a precursor of subsequent great developments in high-precision calculations of electroweak processes in light nuclei. The application of effective field theory to nuclear systems is a prominent example of these ...

The implications of an effective field theory (EFT) interpretation of nuclear mean-field phenomenology are reviewed.