Chiral effective field theories of the strong interactions

Abstract

Effective field theories of the strong interactions based on the approximate chiral symmetry of QCD provide a model-independent approach to low-energy hadron physics. We give a brief introduction to mesonic and baryonic chiral perturbation theory and discuss a number of applications. We also consider the effective field theory including vector and axial-vector mesons.

Comments: 22 pages, 9 figures, proceedings of "Many-Body Structure of Strongly Interacting Systems", Mainz, Germany, Feb. 23-25 2011