EFFECTIVE FIELD THEORY IN NUCLEAR PHYSICS

MARTIN J. SAVAGE
2001 Chiral Dynamics  
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. I. THE FUNDAMENTAL SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS ADDRESSED A fundamental challenge facing the nuclear physics community is the development of a theory that describes the properties and dynamics of the strongly interacting mesons and baryons. This theory must
more » ... be consistent with QCD for processes below the chiral symmetry breaking scale, a scale comparable with the nucleon mass. The importance of meeting this challenge cannot be overstated as it is vital for a theoretical description of nuclei and multi-nucleon processes, including electroweak probes. Further, it is necessary in order to make reliable predictions in conditions that are not accessible to controlled measurement, such as those that exist in supernovae, or during hadronization following the formation of a quark-gluon plasma. Effective field theory (EFT) organizes quantum field theories according to hierarchies of physical scales [1] . The Standard Model of electroweak interactions is a beautiful ex- * NT@UW-00-036
doi:10.1142/9789812810977_0013 fatcat:fbukt4uzlncmnk6ojrapdofsqm