Chiral relativistic model of nuclear matter including effects of confinement mechanism

This work aims at constructing a model for symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter in a relativistic approach including effects from quantum chromodynamics, in particular chiral symmetry and confinement. We consider an assembly of nucleons interacting via meson exchange. The attraction is due to a chiral invariant scalar field associated with the fluctuations of the chiral condensate. The inclusion of scalar nucleonic effects due to the quark substructure of the nucleon ensures the saturation to occur. The parameters corresponding to the scalar sector of the interaction and to the quarks confinement in the nucleon are obtained from lattice calculations. The rest of the parameters are obtained as much as possible by hadron phenomenology. With such constrained inputs, the results are nevertheless very good: this constitutes the originality of this work. In one part, we chose to work at the mean-field level in the Hartree-Fock scheme. The propagation of the scalar field in the Hartree-Fock terms induce some rearrangement effects which play an essential role in the Hugenholtz-Van Hove theorem. We discuss also the role of the tensor part of the ρ interaction in the symmetry energy and the isospin dependence of the Landau effective mass. Then, in the idea to enlarge this work to neutron stars, we give the equation of state predicted by our model. The last step corresponds to the introduction of effects after the mean-field including the correlation energy due to pion loops. An important ingredient is the Landau-Migdal parameter controlling short range interactions. The correlation energy enhances the description of the saturation point of nuclear matter. (author)