Nuclear Saturation with in-Medium Meson Exchange Interactions

Abstract

We show that the assumption of dropping meson masses together with conventional many-body effects, implemented in the relativistic Dirac-Brueckner formalism, explains nuclear saturation. We use a microscopic model for correlated $2π$ exchange and include the standard many-body effects on the in-medium pion propagation, which initially increase the attractive nucleon-nucleon ($NN$) potential with density. For the vector meson exchanges in both the $ππ$ and $NN$ sector, we assume Brown-Rho scaling which---in concert with `chiral' $ππ$ contact interactions---reduces the attraction at higher densities.

5 pages REVTeX, 2 eps-figures included, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett