Effective Field Theories

Abstract

These lectures introduce some of the basic ideas of effective field theories. The topics discussed include: relevant and irrelevant operators and scaling, renormalization in effective field theories, decoupling of heavy particles, power counting, and naive dimensional analysis. Effective Lagrangians are used to study the $\Delta S=2$ weak interactions and chiral perturbation theory.

Comments: 52 pages, 20 figures. Uses temuphys.cmm (available from xxx.lanl.gov) One lecture of introductory material added to hep-ph/9508245 (1996 Schladming Winter School Lectures)