Non-relativistic particles in a thermal bath

Heavy particles are a window to new physics and new phenomena. Since the late eighties they are treated by means of effective field theories that fully exploit the symmetries and power counting typical of non-relativistic systems. More recently these effective field theories have been extended to describe non-relativistic particles propagating in a medium. After introducing some general features common to any non-relativistic effective field theory, we discuss two specific examples: heavy Majorana neutrinos colliding in a hot plasma of Standard Model particles in the early universe and quarkonia produced in heavy-ion collisions dissociating in a quark-gluon plasma.