Light Front Treatment of Nuclei: Formalism and Simple Applications

Abstract

A relativistic light front treatment of nuclei is developed by performing light front quantization for a chiral Lagrangian. The energy momentum tensor and the appropriate Hamiltonian are obtained. Three illustrations of the formalism are made. (1) Pion-nucleon scattering at tree level is shown to reproduce soft pion theorems. (2) The one boson exchange treatment of nucleon-nucleon scattering is developed and shown (by comparison with previous results of the equal time formulation) to lead to a reasonable description of nucleon-nucleon phase shifts. (3) The mean field approximation is applied to infinite nuclear matter, and the plus momentum distributions of that system are studied. The mesons are found to carry a significant fraction of the plus momentum, but are inaccessible to experiments.