Chiral effective field theory for nuclear matter

Abstract

We report on the recent developments of a new effective field theory for nuclear matter [1, 2, 3]. We present first the nuclear matter chiral power counting that takes into account both short- and long-range inter-nucleon interactions. It also identifies non-perturbative strings of diagrams, related to the iteration of nucleon-nucleon interactions, which have to be re-summed. The methods of unitary chiral perturbation theory has been shown to be a useful tool in order to perform those resummations. Results up to next-to-leading order for the ground state energy per particle of nuclear matter, the in-medium chiral quark condensate and pion self-energy are discussed. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.