¹S₀ pairing correlations in relativistic nuclear matter and the two-nucleon virtual state

We use the Gorkov formulation of the Dirac-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation to nuclear pairing to study the ^1S_0 nucleon-nucleon correlations in nuclear matter. We find the short-range correlations of the ^1S_0 pairing fields to be almost identical to those of the two-nucleon virtual state. We obtain mutually consistent results for the pairing fields, using several different sets of effective interaction parameters, when we demand that each of these sets places the virtual-state pole at its physical location.