In-medium meson properties and field transformations

Since the existing calculations of the effective meson mass in nuclear medium involve approximations, it is important to examine whether they satisfy the general requirement of the equivalence theorem that the physical observables should be independent of the choice of field variables. We study here consequences of nucleon field transformations. As an illustrative case we consider the in-medium effective pion mass calculated for the s-wave pion-nucleon interaction in the linear density approximation. We demonstrate that it is necessary to include the Born term explicitly in order that the effective pion mass should obey the equivalence theorem.