FIELD-DEPENDENT COUPLING STRENGTH FOR SCALAR FIELDS

Effective Lagrangians with a nonlinear coupling between the scalar density of the nucleons and the scalar meson field are investigated within the framework of relativistic mean-field theories. This phenomenological coupling acts as a field-dependent coupling strength and is supposed to take into account renormalization effects within a mean-field picture. The parameters of the model are adjusted to saturation properties of nuclear matter and predictions for the real part of the optical potential are compared with experimental data. For that relativistic and nonrelativistic optical model fits are examined and an experimental standard is deduced which covers the energy range from - 50 MeV to 1000 MeV. A definition for the real part of the optical potential is given which is not linear in the energy but has the proper limits for momentum zero and infinity. It is shown that for a special choice of the field-dependent coupling strength the mean-field theory can describe the nuclear equation of state and the momentum dependence of the single particle energy without further parameters up to momenta where the intrinsic structure of nucleon becomes relevant.