Correlations and the Dirac Structure of the Nucleon Self-Energy

The Dirac structure of the nucleon self-energy in symmetric nuclear matter as well as neutron matter is derived from a realistic meson exchange model for the nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction. It is demonstrated that the effects of correlations on the effective NN interaction in the nuclear medium can be parameterized by means of an effective meson exchange. This analysis leads to a very intuitive interpretation of correlation effects and also provides an efficient parametrization of an effective interaction to be used in relativistic structure calculations for finite nuclei.