Rearrangement in the density dependent relativistic field theory of nuclei

A fully covariant density dependent hadronic field theory is obtained by describing medium effects as a field-theoretical functional dependence of meson-nucleon vertices on the baryon field operators. Rearrangement self-energies are found in the baryon field equations from the variational derivatives of the vertices. Solutions are studied in the Hartree limit and compared to the local density approximation for relativistic Dirac-Brueckner theory. Descriptions of medium effects in terms of the baryon vector and scalar density, respectively, are discussed. Hartree calculations for nuclei between 16O and 208Pb show that rearrangement improves simultaneously the description of binding energies, root-mean-square radii and density distributions.