Nuclear mean field from chirally symmetric effective theory

The mean-field theory of the nuclear many-body problem proposed recently by Furnstahl, Serot, and Tang (FST) is discussed. The FST chiral Lagrangian is derived in terms of an effective field theory. This new approach allows one to construct in a controlled manner the universal nuclear Lagrangian consistent with symmetries of QCD. The FST Lagrangian is constructed by using power counting, i.e., the expansion in powers of the lowest lying hadronic fields and their derivatives. Terms in the Lagrangian are organized by applying Georgi’s naive dimensional analysis and “naturalness” condition. The relevant degrees of freedom are nucleons, pions, an isoscalar-vector field ω meson), an isoscalar-scalar field (σ meson), and an isovector-vector field (ρ meson). The chiral symmetry is realized nonlinearly using a standard WCCWZ procedure.