Vacuum effects on the properties of nuclear matter under an external magnetic field

Abstract

The effects of the Dirac sea of the nucleons are investigated within a covariant model of the hadronic interaction. We extend the usual Mean Field Approximation and present a procedure to deal with divergences which are proportional to polynomials on the magnetic field intensity. For this purpose a nucleon propagator is used which takes accounts of the full effect of the magnetic field as well as the presence of the anomalous magnetic moments of both protons and neutrons. We examine single particle properties and bulk thermodynamical quantities and conclude that within a reasonable range of densities and magnetic intensities the effects found are moderate.