# Do we know how to count powers in pionless and pionful effective field theory?

## TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in effective field theory for low-energy nuclear systems, focusing on power counting in pionless and pionful sectors, and discusses implications for few- and many-body calculations.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent progress and debates on power counting schemes in pionless and pionful EFT, including model-independent NN interactions.

## Key findings

- Power counting is well understood in pionless EFT at the NN level.
- Recent developments aim to extend EFT to few- and many-body nuclear systems.
- Debates continue on the appropriate power counting scheme in pionful EFT.

## Abstract

In this article I summarize recent progress in the effective field theory approach to low energy nuclear systems, with a focus on the power counting issue. In the pionless sector, where the power counting is quite well understood at the nucleon-nucleon (NN) level, I discuss some recent developments toward few- and many-body calculations. In the pionful sector, I focus on the actively debated issue of power counting in the NN sector and some recent developments toward a model-independent NN interaction. Finally, the scenario that the power counting might depend on the number of particles is discussed.