Strong Interactions: Effective Field Theories of QCD
An MIT OpenCourseWare graduate course on building and applying effective field theories to make predictions from the Standard Model. Topics include matching, renormalization, the operator product expansion, power counting, and running with the renormalization group. The course covers factorization in hard processes relevant to the LHC, heavy quark decays and CP violation, chiral perturbation theory, non-relativistic bound states in QED and QCD, and nucleon effective theories with fine-tuning. Material draws from QCD, electroweak physics, and gravity applications. As with other MIT OCW offerings, the course provides lecture notes and problem sets from the original MIT physics curriculum, free to access, with no certificate offered. Aimed at advanced physics students already familiar with quantum field theory who want to see how effective theories are constructed and used in modern particle physics research.