Nuclear chiral dynamics and thermodynamics

Understand

This presentation reviews an approach to nuclear many-body systems based on the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry of low-energy QCD.

• In the low-energy limit, for energies and momenta small compared to a characteristic symmetry breaking scale of order 1 GeV, QCD is realized as an effective field theory of Goldstone bosons (pions) coupled to heavy fermionic sources (nucleons).
• Nuclear forces at long and intermediate distance scales result from a systematic hierarchy of one- and two-pion exchange processes in combination with Pauli blocking effects in the nuclear medium.
• Short distance dynamics, not resolved at the wavelengths corresponding to typical nuclear Fermi momenta, are introduced as contact interactions between nucleons.