Can chiral EFT give us satisfaction?

Understand

We compare nuclear forces derived from chiral effective field theory (EFT) with those obtained from traditional (phenomenological and meson) models.

• By means of a careful analysis of paralleles and differences, we show that chiral EFT is superior to all earlier approaches in terms of both formal aspects and successful applications in ab initio calculations.
• However, in spite of the considerable progress made possible by chiral EFT, complete satisfaction cannot be claimed until outstanding problems---the renormalization issue being the most important one---are finally settled.