Relativistic mean field and some recent applications

The essentials of the Relativistic Mean Field (RMF) theory and some of its recent applications are presented. The explicit calculations are carried out for a few selected isotopic, isotonic and isobaric chains of nuclei covering the entire periodic table. The calculated ground state properties are found to be in good agreement with the corresponding experiment: the binding energies are reproduced within 0.25%, on average, and the charge radii differ only in the second decimal place of fermi. The relativistic origin of the pseudo-spin symmetry is briefly discussed. The density distributions obtained, are found to be in good agreement with the experiment (where available). The peripheral factor, the ratio of neutron and proton densities on the nuclear periphery, extracted in the anti-proton annihilation experiments are well reproduced. The RMF densities are used to calculate the reaction (σ_R) and charge changing (σ_cc) cross sections in the Glauber model, as well as the α (cluster)-daughter interaction energy. The latter is then employed to estimate the decay half lives of Super-Heavy (trans-actinide) nuclei in the WKB approximation. The calculations are found to agree well with the experiment. This success of the RMF in accurately describing the nuclear properties with only a few fixed parameters is indeed remarkable.