Do we know how to count powers in pionless and pionful effective field theory?

Understand

In this article I summarize recent progress in the effective field theory approach to low energy nuclear systems, with a focus on the power counting issue.

• In the pionless sector, where the power counting is quite well understood at the nucleon-nucleon (NN) level, I discuss some recent developments toward few- and many-body calculations.
• In the pionful sector, I focus on the actively debated issue of power counting in the NN sector and some recent developments toward a model-independent NN interaction.
• Finally, the scenario that the power counting might depend on the number of particles is discussed.