This article is an account of the present position of theories of nuclear matter initiated some years ago mainly by Jastrow and Brueckner. Section 1 introduces the basic ideas. Section 2 discusses the variational approach. Section 3 develops methods involving partial summations in perturbation theory. The difficulties confronting the latter approach, and their partial resolution by ideas from superconductivity theory, are analysed in § 4. Much of the formalism is relevant also in the theory of individual nuclei (see for example the review by Eden 1959) and in fields other than nuclear physics (see for example The Many Body Problem, Les Houches, 1958). However, in the selection of material our criterion has been relevance for the ground state of nuclear matter.
Abstract The tensor-optimized Fermi sphere (TOFS) theory is applied first for the study of the property of nuclear matter using the Argonne V4
′NN potential. In the TOFS theory, the correlated nuclear matter wave function is taken to be a power-series type of the correlation function
F, where
F can induce central, spin–isospin, tensor, etc. correlations. This expression has been ensured by a linked cluster expansion theorem established in the TOFS theory. We take into account the contributions from all the many-body terms arising from the product of the nuclear matter Hamiltonian
H and
F. The correlation function is optimally determined in the variation of the total energy of nuclear matter. It is found that the density dependence of the energy per particle in nuclear matter is reasonably reproduced up to the nuclear matter density
ρ≃0.20 fm
−3 in the present numerical calculation, in comparison with other methods such as the Brueckner–Hartree–Fock approach.