Strong Interactions at Low Energy

Abstract

The lectures review some of the basic concepts relevant for an understanding of the low energy properties of the strong interactions: chiral symmetry, spontaneous symmetry breakdown, Goldstone bosons, quark condensate. The effective field theory used to analyze the low energy structure is briefly sketched. As an illustration, I discuss the implications of the recent data on the decay $K\to \pi \pi e\nu$ for the magnitude of the quark condensate.

Comments: Lectures given at the school of physics "Understanding the structure of hadrons", Prague, July 2001, 20 pp