Many-body forces and the binding energy of high-density nuclear matter

Abstract

The total contribution of all intrinsic pion-exchange many-body forces to the binding energy of nuclear matter is obtained in terms of an integral equation, the kernel of which includes the effect of pairwise correlations between the nucleons. This integral equation is solved for simple cases of the $\ensuremath{\pi}N$ interaction, and it is found that the resulting contribution to the energy increases rapidly as a function of the density, even in the presence of correlations. However, at very high densities we find that for a large class of many-body potentials the correlations completely suppress the contribution to the energy of forces involving four or more nucleons.