TABLE OF CONTENTS 
, V ) and Relativistic Mean Field TheoryA principal goal of nuclear physics is to develop a consistent, economic understanding of the main features of the structure of ordinary nuclei that can be extrapolated to new regions of baryon density, temperature, neutron/proton ratio, strangeness content, and momentum transfer.
Traditional, non-relativistic many-body theory provides one approach. Here static potentials fit to two-body scattering and bound-state data are inserted in the non-relativistic many-particle Schr dinger equation, and that equation is solved with certain approximations, or exactly for few-nucleon systems. Although this approach has had a great deal of success, it does have some obvious shortcomings. At large distance and long wavelength, the nuclear interaction between nucleons is mediated by the exchange of mesons, and eventually the approximation of replacing this interaction with static potentials, rather than dealing dynamically with these degrees of freedom, becomes inadequate. Furthermore, while correctly incorporating quantum mechanics, the traditional approach overlooks the principles of special relativity. One of these principles, for example, that no signal can be propagated faster than the speed of...
