Relativistic Hamiltonians in many-body theories

We discuss the description of a many-body nuclear system using Hamiltonians that contain the nucleon relativistic kinetic energy and potentials with relativistic corrections. Through the Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation, the field theoretical problem of interacting nucleons and mesons is mapped to an equivalent one in terms of relativistic potentials, which are then expanded at some order in 1/m_N. The formalism is applied to the Hartree problem in nuclear matter, showing how the results of the relativistic mean field theory can be recovered over a wide range of densities.