Nuclear matter theory revisited

Claiming that the usual Fermi sea of plane waves Hartree-Fock vacuum state cannot be the true (or stablest) ground vacuum state for nuclear matter, since it violates a monotonicity requirement, the author discusses some recent attempts in facing the problem of how to find such a (zero-order) state. The one-dimensional Fermi gas with zero- and finite-range interactions, as well as self-consistent alpha-clustering effects in three-dimensional nuclear matter, are employed as examples to illustrate the concepts involved in such a search. (Auth.)