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

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 ...

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.

In this article I summarize recent progress in the effective field theory approach to low energy nuclear systems, with a focus on the power counting issue. In the pionless sector, where the power counting is quite well understood at the nucleon-nucleon (NN) level, I discuss some recent developments toward few- and many-body calculations. In the pionful sector, I focus on the actively debated issue of power counting in the NN sector and some recent developments toward a model-...

An introduction to nuclear theory is given starting from the quantum chromodynamics foundations for quark and gluon fields, then discussing properties of pions and nucleons, interactions between nucleons, structure of the deuteron and light nuclei, and finishing at the description of heavy nuclei. It is shown how concepts of different energy and size scales and ideas related to effective fields and symmetry breaking, enter our description of nuclear systems.

We consider two nonperturbative methods originally used to derive shell model effective interactions in nuclei. These methods have been applied to the two nucleon sector to obtain an energy independent effective interaction V_{low k}, which preserves the low momentum half-on-shell T matrix and the deuteron pole, with a sharp cutoff imposed on all intermediate state momenta. We show that V_{low k} scales with the cutoff precisely as one expects from renormalization group argum...

We study an effective field theory of interacting nucleons at distances much greater than the pion's Compton wavelength. In this regime the NN potential is conjectured to be the sum of a delta function and its derivatives. The question we address is whether this sum can be consistently truncated at a given order in the derivative expansion, and systematically improved by going to higher orders. Regularizing the Lippmann-Schwinger equation using a cutoff we find that the cutof...

Modern effective-theory techniques are applied to the nuclear many-body problem. A novel approach is proposed for the renormalization of operators in a manner consistent with the construction of the effective potential. To test this approach, a one-dimensional, yet realistic, nucleon-nucleon potential is introduced. An effective potential is then constructed by tuning its parameters to reproduce the exact effective-range expansion and a variety of bare operators are renormali...

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.

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...

We study the $N_c$ scalings of pion-nucleon and nucleon-nucleon scatterings and find that a consistent large $N_c$ counting can be established if we assume Witten's counting rules are applied to matrix elements or scattering amplitudes which use the relativistic normalization for the nucleons. With the pionless effective field theory, we also find that the $S$-wave nucleon-nucleon interaction is so strong that it should be treated nonperturbatively at the leading order in the...