Power Counting and Wilsonian Renormalization in Nuclear Effective Field Theory

Understand

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.