SELF-CONSISTENT APPROACH TO THE WIGNER-SEITZ TREATMENT OF SOLITON MATTER

We propose a self-consistent approach to the treatment of nuclear matt er as a crystal of solitons in the Wigner-Seitz approximation. Specifi cally, we use a Bloch-like boundary condition on the quarks at the edg e of a spherical cell which allows the dispersion relation for a given radius to be calculated self-consistently along with the meson fields ; in previous work some ansatz for the dispersion relation has always been an input. Results in all models are very sensitive to the form of the dispersion relation, and so our approach represents a significant advance. We apply the method to both the Friedberg-Lee model and the chiral quark-meson model of Birse and Banerjee. Only the latter shows short-range repulsion; in the former the transition to a quark plasma occurs at unrealistically low densities.