New insights concerning dimension-eight effects in weak decays

Most past work on weak nonleptonic decays has mixed dimensional regularization in the weak operator product expansion with some form of a cutoff regularization in the evaluation of the matrix elements. Even with the usual technique of matching the two schemes, this combination misses physics at short distance which can be described by dimension eight (and higher dimension) operators. I describe some recent work with V. Cirigliano and E. Golowich which clarifies these effects and provides a numerical estimate suggesting that they are important.Comment: 3 pages, talk presented at the Division of Particles and Fields Meeting, DPF 2000, Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 200

Light Quark Masses and Mixing Angles

I review the present state of our knowledge about the masses and weak mixing elements of the u, d, s quarks. This is the written version of lectures given in the 1993 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI).Comment: UMHEP-402, Latex file, 27 page

The effective field theory treatment of quantum gravity

This is a pedagogical introduction to the treatment of quantum general relativity as an effective field theory. It starts with an overview of the methods of effective field theory and includes an explicit example. Quantum general relativity matches this framework and I discuss gravitational examples as well as the limits of the effective field theory. I also discuss the insights from effective field theory on the gravitational effects on running couplings in the perturbative regime.Comment: Presented at the Sixth International School on Field Theory and Gravitation, Petropolis, Brazil, April 2012, to be published in the proceedings. 22 pages, 3 figure

When Effective Field Theories Fail

In this talk, I describe and defend four non-standard claims about four effective field theories, and try to extract some lessons about the limits of effective field theory. The four theses (and a capsule diagnosis given in parentheses) are: 1) Kaon loops are not a reliable part of chiral perturbation theory (dimensional regularization does not know about the chiral scale), 2) Regge physics is inappropriately missing from SCET (an infinite set of scales are needed) 3) There is likely a barrier in the use of EFT in general relativity in the extreme infrared (curvature effects build up) and 4) Gauge non-invariant operators should be included in describing physics beyond the Standard Model (as they could probe the idea of emergent gauge symmetry and falsify string theory).Comment: Opening talk at the International Workshop on Effective Field Theories, Valencia, 2-6 February 2009. 15 pages, 6 figure

Sigma exchange in the nuclear force and effective field theory

In the phenomenological description of the nuclear interaction a crucial role is traditionally played by the exchange of a scalar I=0 meson, the sigma, of mass 500-600 MeV, which however is not seen clearly in the particle spectrum and which has a very ambiguous status in QCD. I show that a remarkably simple and reasonably controlled combination of ingredients can reproduce the features of this part of the nuclear force. The use of chiral perturbation theory calculations for two pion exchange supplemented by the Omnes function for pion rescattering suffices to reproduce the magnitude and shape of the exchange of a supposed $\sigma$ particle, even though no such particle is present in this calculation. I also show how these ingredients can describe the contact interaction that enters more modern descriptions of the internucleon interaction.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Normalization in Fig 3b correcte

Dynamics of M-theory vacua

At very early times, the universe was not in a vacuum state. Under the assumtion that the deviation from equillibrium was large, in particular that it is higher than the scale of inflation, we analyse the conditions for local transitions between states that are related to different vacua. All pathways lead to an attractor solution of a description of the universe by eternal inflation with domains that have different low energy parameters. The generic case favors transitions between states that have significantly different parameters rather than jumps between nearby states in parameter space. I argue that the strong CP problem presents a potential difficulty for this picture, more difficult than the hierarchy problem or the cosmological constant problem. Finally, I describe how the spectrum of quark masses may be a probe of the early dynamics of vacuum states. As an example, by specializing to the case of intersecting braneworld models, I show that the observed mass spectrum, which is approximately scale invariant, corresponds to a flat distribution in the intersection area of the branes, with a maximum area A_max ~ 100 alpha'.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figure