Relativistic Brueckner-Hartree - Fock theory for finite nuclei

Starting with a bare nucleon-nucleon interaction, for the first time the full relativistic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock equations are solved for finite nuclei in a Dirac-Woods-Saxon basis. No free parameters are introduced to calculate the ground-state properties of finite nuclei. The nucleus ¹⁶O is investigated as an example. The resulting groundstate properties, such as binding energy and charge radius, are considerably improved as compared with the non-relativistic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock results and much closer to the experimental data. This opens the door for ab initio covariant investigations of heavy nuclei.