Effects of self-consistency in a Green’s function description of saturation in nuclear matter

The binding energy in nuclear matter is evaluated within the framework of self-consistent Green’s function theory, using a realistic nucleon-nucleon interaction. The two-body dynamics is solved at the level of summing particle-particle and hole-hole ladders. We go beyond the on-shell approximation and use intermediary propagators with a discrete-pole structure. A three-pole approximation is used, which provides a good representation of the quasiparticle excitations, as well as reproducing the zeroth- and first-order energy-weighted moments in both the nucleon removal and addition domains of the spectral function. Results for the binding energy are practically independent of the details of the discretization scheme. The main effect of the increased self-consistency is to introduce an additional density dependence, which causes a shift towards lower densities and smaller binding energies, as compared to a (continuous choice) Brueckner calculation with the same interaction. Particle number conservation and the Hugenholz–Van Hove theorem are satisfied with reasonable accuracy.