The Power Of Effective Field Theories In Nuclei: The Deuteron, NN Scattering and Electroweak Processes

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.

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

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.

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.

We review our recent calculations of electroweak processes involving the deuteron, based on pionless effective field theory with dibaryon fields. These calculations are concerned with neutron-neutron fusion and np -> d gamma at BBN energies.

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.

I present the results obtained for several observables in the two-nucleon sector using effective field theory with KSW power-counting and dimensional regularization. In addition to the phase shifts for nucleon-nucleon scattering, several deuteron observables are discussed, including electromagnetic form factors, polarizabilities, gamma+d -> gamma+d Compton scattering, and n+p -> d+gamma. A detailed comparison between the effective field theory with pions, the theory without p...

I review recent developments in the application of effective field theory to nuclear physics. Emphasis is placed on precision two-body calculations and efforts to formulate the nuclear shell model in terms of an effective field theory.

The application of the effective field theory (EFT) method to nuclear systems is reviewed. The roles of degrees of freedom, QCD symmetries, power counting, renormalization, and potentials are discussed. EFTs are constructed for various energy regimes of relevance in nuclear physics, and are used in systematic expansions to derive nuclear forces in terms of a number of parameters that embody information about QCD dynamics. Two-, three-, and many-nucleon systems, including exte...

I provide a brief, and therefore necessarily biased, review of the application of effective field theory to electromagnetic processes on the deuteron. Electron-deuteron scattering is discussed for virtual photon momenta up to 700 MeV, and photon-deuteron scattering is examined for incident photon energies of order the pion mass.