Low Energy Effective Theories of QCD

Course description

The course is held in the second half of the spring semester (17.04 - 29.05, no lecture on 08.05) 2018. The meetings take place on Tuesdays from 14-16 in room 119.

I will provide a detailed introduction to the method of effective field theories for systems with spontaneous symmetry breaking and discuss in particular the case of QCD. I will discuss the formulation of chiral perturbation theory up to one loop and provide an introduction to the heat-kernel method which will be used to renormalize the theory in a chiral invariant way.
After this introduction I will discuss modern applications, which in many cases involve a matching to dispersive representations. An introduction to dispersion relations will be provided. With this matching it is often possible to substantially improve the precision of the predictions.