Relativistic Brueckner Approach to the Structure of Finite Nuclei

Ab initio calculations of the structure of nuclei are of fundamental interest in nuclear physics, and in the past considerable
progress has been made with non-relativistic many-body methods. On the other side, in the study of nuclear matter through relativistic Dirac-Brueckner-Hartree-Fock (RBHF) theory, relativistic effects play an important role. Due to its numerical complexity, however, the extension of RBHF to the study of finite nuclear systems is very difficult. I will
discuss recent efforts in relativistic ab initio calculations with RBHF for the structure of finite nuclei and I will show how such calculations can guide us to construct better nuclear density functionals, which in turn provide a very good description of nuclei all over the periodic table with much lower computational costs as compared to ab initio calculations.