The power of effective field theories in nuclei: The deuteron,NN scattering and electroweak processes

We show how effectively effective quantum field theories work in nuclear physics. Using the physically transparent cut-off regularization, we study the simplest nuclear systems of two nucleons for both bound and scattering states at a momentum scale much less than the pion mass. We consider all the static properties of the deuteron, the two-nucleon scattering phase-shifts, the n + p → d + γ process at thermal energy and the solar proton fusion process p + p → d + e⁺ + ν_e, and we demonstrate that these are all described with great accuracy in the expansion to the next-to-leading order. We explore how a “new” degree of freedom enters in an effective theory by turning on and off the role of the pion in the Lagrangian.