Electroweak Interactions in a Chiral Effective Lagrangian for Nuclei

Abstract

We have studied electroweak (EW) interactions in quantum hadrodynamics (QHD) effective field theory (EFT). The Lorentz-covariant EFT contains nucleon, pion, $\Delta$, isoscalar scalar ($\sigma$) and vector ($\omega$) fields, and isovector vector ($\rho$) fields. The lagrangian exhibits a nonlinear realization of (approximate) $SU(2)_L \otimes SU(2)_R$ chiral symmetry and incorporates vector meson dominance. First, we discuss the EW interactions at the quark level. Then we include EW interactions in QHD EFT by using the background-field technique. The completed QHD EFT has a nonlinear realization of $SU(2)_L \otimes SU(2)_R \otimes U(1)_B$ (chiral symmetry and baryon number conservation), as well as realizations of other symmetries including Lorentz-invariance, $C$, $P$, and $T$. Meanwhile, as we know, chiral symmetry is manifestly broken due to the nonzero quark masses; the $P$ and $C$ symmetries are also broken because of weak interactions. These breaking patterns are parameterized in a general way in the EFT. Moreover, we have included the $\Delta$ resonance as manifest degrees of freedom in our QHD EFT, with a discussion of the irrelevance of the well-known pathologies involving high-spin fields from the modern EFT perspective. This enables us to discuss physics at the kinematics where the resonance becomes important. As a result, the effective theory uses hadronic degrees of freedom, satisfies the constraints due to QCD (symmetries and their breaking pattern), and is calibrated to strong-interaction phenomena. Applications to (anti)neutrino scattering are briefly discussed.