Nrqed in Bound States: Applying Renormalization to an Effective Field Theory

Abstract

This is a pedagogical introduction to NRQED, a low enery approximation of QED which can be made to reproduce QED to an arbitrary precision. It is especially useful when applied to nonrelativistic bound states. We start by explaining why QED is so difficult to apply to nr bound states, why NRQED makes it much simpler and then proceed to do an explicit calculation. We also briefly discuss what this can teach us about ``new'' physics beyond QED. This is based on a talk given at the XIV MRST meeting in Toronto.