In nuclear matter, for interparticle separations larger than the healing distance (a characteristic long-distance scale of finite-density fermionic systems), the in-medium two-body wave function is essentially a free wave function. In terms of the renormalization group (RG), this implies that the running of the effective field theory (EFT) couplings freezes for $r$-space cutoffs above this distance (or $p$-space cutoffs below the corresponding healing momentum scale). As a consequence the leading-order EFT description of nuclear matter (understood here as the infrared limit of the RG) corresponds to the mean-field approximation and a set of tree-level (i.e., perturbative) leading contact-range couplings. Though the contacts do in principle inherit the power counting they had in the vacuum, their iteration is suppressed in the infrared, explaining why they become perturbative in nuclear matter. In addition to the contact-range potential, RG evolution requires the inclusion of density-dependent terms in the equation of state that can be represented by a pseudopotential, which (unlike the genuine contacts) should not be iterated. The leading order EFT description ends up being a subset of Skyrme forces previously identified by the Orsay group.

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• Effective field theory
• Nuclear matter
• Renormalization