Probing the effectiveness: chiral perturbation theory calculations of low-energy electromagnetic reactions on deuterium

I summarize three recent calculations of electromagnetic reactions on deuterium in chiral perturbation theory. All of these calculations were carried out to O(Q^4), i.e. next-to-next-to-leading order. The reactions discussed here are: elastic electron-deuteron scattering, Compton scattering on deuterium, and the photoproduction of neutral pions from deuterium at threshold