Chiral Perturbation Theory for Nuclear Physicists

Chiral perturbation theory is the low energy effective theory of the strong interactions for the light pseudoscalar degrees of freedom. This program is based on effective Lagrangian techniques and is an expansion in the powers of the momenta and the powers of the quark masses, which correct the soft-pion theorems. After briefly reviewing these features and some results, we address the implications of this program to $\pi-N$ scattering, the $\pi-N$ sigma term and some recent investigations of the implications of chiral symmetry to nucleon-nucleon forces. We finally look at the implications of chiral perturbation theory to hadron mass relations.