108 research outputs found
Power Counting and Wilsonian Renormalization in Nuclear Effective Field Theory
Effective field theories are the most general tool for the description of low
energy phenomena. They are universal and systematic: they can be formulated for
any low energy systems we can think of and offer a clear guide on how to
calculate predictions with reliable error estimates, a feature that is called
power counting. These properties can be easily understood in Wilsonian
renormalization, in which effective field theories are the low energy
renormalization group evolution of a more fundamental ---perhaps unknown or
unsolvable--- high energy theory. In nuclear physics they provide the
possibility of a theoretically sound derivation of nuclear forces without
having to solve quantum chromodynamics explicitly. However there is the problem
of how to organize calculations within nuclear effective field theory: the
traditional knowledge about power counting is perturbative but nuclear physics
is not. Yet power counting can be derived in Wilsonian renormalization and
there is already a fairly good understanding of how to apply these ideas to
non-perturbative phenomena and in particular to nuclear physics. Here we review
a few of these ideas, explain power counting in two-nucleon scattering and
reactions with external probes and hint at how to extend the present analysis
beyond the two-body problem.Comment: Contribution to the IJMPE special issue on "Effective Field Theories
in Nuclear Physics". This update includes the corrections and changes of the
published versio
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