Effective field theory and classical equations of motion

Abstract

Given a theory containing both heavy and light fields (the UV theory), a standard procedure is to integrate out the heavy field to obtain an effective field theory (EFT) for the light fields. Typically, the EFT equations of motion consist of an expansion involving higher and higher derivatives of the fields, whose truncation at any finite order may not be well-posed. In this paper, we address the question of how to make sense of the EFT equations of motion and whether they provide a good approximation to the classical UV theory. We propose an approach to solving EFTs, which leads to a well-posedness statement. For a particular choice of UV theory, we rigorously derive the corresponding EFT and show that a large class of classical solutions to the UV theory are well approximated by EFT solutions. We also consider solutions of the UV theory, which are not well approximated by EFT solutions, and demonstrate that these are close, in an averaged sense, to solutions of a modified EFT.