Course description
The course is held in the second half of the spring semester 2016. It takes place on Thursdays (April 21 & 28, May 12, 19, 26, June 2) from 14-16 in room B1 and on Tuesdays (May 3 & 31) from 14-16 in room 119.
Our ability to make sense of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at low energies is guided to a large extent by two principles: chiral symmetry and effective field theory. The model-independent marriage of the two is known as chiral perturbation theory (ChPT), a framework that allows one to perform a systematic analysis of the low-energy Green’s functions and scattering amplitudes of QCD. In this course, we will cover the basic concepts of ChPT for mesons, in particular, the notion of
perturbing about a Nambu-Goldstone symmetry and the connection to effective Lagrangians. The construction of the ChPT Lagrangian for the strong and weak interactions will be outlined, with several applications to phenomenology discussed.
