Leading-order nucleon self-energy in relativistic chiral effective field theory

Abstract

We apply thermal field theory methods to compute microscopically the nucleon self-energy arising from one-pion exchange in isospin-symmetric nuclear matter and neutron matter. A self-consistent numerical scheme is introduced and its convergence is demonstrated. The repulsive contribution from the Fock exchange diagram to the energy per nucleon in symmetric nuclear matter is obtained.

v3: matches published version, 8 pages, 6 figures. Removed discussion of saturation, changed title to reflect the shortened content. v1: 9 pages, 7 figures, v2: minor amendments