A walk through the world of chiral dynamics

Abstract

Hadron-hadron scattering lengths are fine probes of our understanding of nonperturbative QCD. I discuss the status of a variety of scattering processes sensitive to the spontaneous and explicit chiral symmetry breaking of QCD, such as pion-pion, pion-kaon, pion-nucleon, antikaon-nucleon and Goldstone boson scattering off D-mesons. The fruitful interplay of theory, experiment and lattice QCD is emphasized. I point out what has to be done in these fields to gain further insight into these fundamental parameters.

Plenary talk, The 7th International Workshop on Chiral Dynamics, August 6 -10, 2012, Jefferson Lab, Newport News, Virginia, USA, to appear in the proceedings, references updated