Chiral Unitary approach to meson-meson and meson-baryon interactions and nuclear applications

We report on recent nonperturbative techniques that combine the information of chiral Lagrangians (with and without resonances) with unitarity in coupled channels and other requirements of the S-matrix theory of the strong interactions. As a result, the region of applicability of such techniques is much larger than the one of Chiral Perturbation Theory allowing one to study also resonance physics. Applications to meson-meson and meson-baryon scattering, as well as to problems where pairs of mesons or a meson and a baryon appear in the initial or final state are shown. Implications in several nuclear problems are also discussed.Comment: 85 pages, Latex, Review paper to appear in Prog. Part. Nucl. Phys., vol. 4