Dimer Effective Field Theory

by David Benjamin Kaplan (American University)

Monday 15 Jun 2026, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Weinberg’s vision of applying effective field theory to nuclear physics has been stubbornly difficult to realize as a systematic momentum expansion like chiral perturbation theory for mesons.  At the very least one would hope to describe nucleon-nucleon scattering well up to the pion production threshold, but even that has been problematic.  I argue that the culprit may be unsuspected resonance structures in the complex momentum plane associated with the spin-triplet partial waves relatively close to the origin which obstruct a momentum expansion.  By including new degrees of freedom in the EFT — “dimers” we show that the radius of convergence of the theory is greatly improved with excellent agreement with data at low order in the expansion.

material:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28842