Nuclear Saturation with in-Medium Meson Exchange Interactions

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We show that the assumption of dropping meson masses together with conventional many-body effects, implemented in the relativistic Dirac-Brueckner formalism, explains nuclear saturation. We use a microscopic model for correlated 2π exchange and include the standard many-body effects on the in-medium pion propagation, which initially increase the attractive nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential with density. For the vector meson exchanges in both the ππ and NN sector, we assume Brown-Rho scaling which---in concert with `chiral' ππ contact interactions---reduces the attraction at higher densities.