Light nuclei with perturbative pions

Effective field theories (EFTs) enable the systematic derivation of nuclear interaction based on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). While the so-called Pionless EFT is designed to describe nuclear phenomena at the lowest energies, Chiral EFT directly exploits constraints arising from the approximate chiral symmetry of QCD to construct an EFT that incorporates the physics of pion exchange between nucleons, and therefore covers a larger range of energy scales. One-pion exchange enters already at leading order (LO) in this Chiral EFT expansion, and the alternative scheme to instead include pion exchange perturbatively on top of a pure short-range theory (that coincides with Pionless EFT at LO) were largely abandoned after it was shown that it suffers from poor convergence properties. However, it turns out that the tensor force generated by pion exchange, identified as the main origin of said poor convergence, is suppressed by the large nucleon-nucleon scattering lengths in combination with the smallness of the pion mass. This observation can be used to construct a new chiral EFT scheme that is able to describe nucleon-nucleon scattering over a considerable energy range, with good order-by-order convergence properties. This contribution presents an overview of the resulting new perturbative-pion interaction, and in particular of its performance at the description of light nuclear bound states.