Hadronic atoms

Abstract

We give a brief survey of the theory of hadronic atoms, which represent important sources of information for studying hadron interactions at very low energy. It will be namely demonstrated that a systematic expansion of the observables of hadronic atoms (the energy levels and the decay width) in terms of the fine-structure constant can be obtained, using the framework of non-relativistic effective Lagrangians. We also present a pedagogical introduction to the non-relativistic effective theories that includes a review of the main concepts, such as the scale separation, construction of the Lagrangian, power counting and matching.