Effective Field Theories

This book is a broad-based text intended to help the growing student body interested in topics such as gravitational effective theories, supersymmetric effective theories, applications of effective theory techniques to problems in condensed matter physics (superconductivity) and quantum chromodynamics (such as soft-collinear effective theory). It begins with a review of the use of symmetries to identify the relevant degrees of freedom in a problem, and then presents a variety of methods that can be used to solve physical problems. A detailed discussion of canonical examples of effective field theories with increasing complexity is then conducted. Special cases such as supersymmetry and lattice EFT are discussed, as well as recently-found applications to problems in gravitation and cosmology. An appendix includes various factoids from group theory and other topics that are used throughout the text, in an attempt to make the book self-contained.