Relativistic chiral Hartree-Fock description of nuclear matter with constraints from nucleon structure and confinement

Abstract

We present a relativistic chiral effective theory for symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter taken in the Hartree-Fock scheme. The nuclear binding is ensured by a background chiral invariant scalar field associated with the radial fluctuations of the chiral quark condensate. Nuclear matter saturation is obtained once the scalar response of the nucleon-generating three-body repulsive forces is incorporated. For those parameters related to the scalar sector and quark confinement mechanism inside the nucleon we make use of an analysis of lattice results on nucleon mass evolution with quark mass. The other parameters are constrained as much as possible by standard hadron and nuclear phenomenology. Special attention is paid to the treatment of the propagation of the scalar fluctuations. The rearrangement terms associated with in-medium modified mass and coupling constants are explicitly included to satisfy the Hugenholtz-Van Hove theorem. We point out the important role of the tensor piece of the rho exchange Fock term to reproduce the asymmetry energy of nuclear matter. We also discuss the isospin dependence of the Landau nucleon effective mass.