EFT* for electroweak processes of light nuclei

Recently we succeeded to make a reliable EFT prediction in a totally parameter-free manner for the S factors for the solar pp and hep processes, p + p → d + e+ νe and 3He +p → 4He + e+ + νe[l]. The strategy used in there is to embed a highly sophisticated standard nuclear physics approach (SNPA) exploiting realistic potentials[2,3] into an EFT framework, that we refer to as EFT*. Up to next-next-to-leading order in chiral expansion, it turnes out that there is effectively only one counter-term relevant to this process, the coefficient of which - (d̂R) - has been renormalized to reproduce the experimental value of the tritium-beta decay. Our study has also led to very accurate EFT calculations on two-body weak processes that also receive contributions from the d̂R term, μ - d capture rate[4], and ν - d scattering cross section[5]. © 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.