For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 When Yukawa introduced the mesons in order to explain the short range character of the nuclear forces, the field of nuclear physics split into two parts: nuclear structure and nuclear forces. Nuclear structure developed into non-relativistic nuclear physics and led to the creation of various models to describe the emerging wealth of nuclear data. The field of nuclear forces developed into high energy particle physics with its own immense body of phenomena and data. For most nuclear phenomena the non-relativistic framework is fully adequate. However, this framework is too narrow in phenomena associated with exchange currents and with high momentum transfers. In such cases the presence of particles other than protrons and neutrons in the nuclei must be explicitly accounted for, and one must take recourse to the field of high energy physics. This monograph is devoted to the merger of nuclear and high energy physics, and to the formulation of the quantum field theory of nuclei. The main emphasis in this work is on providing the mathematical tools needed to obtain solutions to specific problems in a fully relativistic, consistent manner and up to a known, predetermined accuracy. I expect that this pioneering work should be of value to all who are involved in calculations of nuclear structure. Sichard M. Roberts Richard W. Roberts ABSTRACT The principles and the mathematical details of a fully relativistic nuclear theory are given. Since the concept of nuclear forces is a strictly non-relativistic construct, it must be abandoned and the forces must be replaced explicitly by their physical origin, i.e., by the interaction between nucleons and mesons. Thus, in this monograph the description of a nucleus has been formulated as a problem of relativistic quantum field theory which is solved by nuclear physics methods. To wit: The physics is described by specifying a Lagrangian which is a functional of the constituent fields (= of the parton fields). The solutions for the physical systems then are obtained in a time-independent treatment as expansions in the parton fields: both particles and nuclei are composite systems, made up of parton configurations, which define a representation of the Hamiltonian (associated with the specified Lagrangian). The Hamiltonian is truncated by omitting all configurations having a diagonal element exceeding that of the lowest configuration by a pre-determined value, Emax, and is diagonalized. All formulae needed to carry out this program are derived and given in full detail for spin 0, 1/2, and 1 parton fields for PS, PV, and interactions. Particular attention is devoted to the center-of-mass position coordinate which in relativistic kinematics is a non-separable many-body operator. Finally, the configurations up to Emax = 1 GeV are listed for the nucleon, the deuteron, and the pion. 4 Key words: Composite particles; interacting quantum fields; nuclear structure; particle structure; relativistic bound systems; relativistic nuclear physics. |