  These lecture notes address a central problem of theoretical nuclear physics:
how to establish a relationship between low-energy, non-perturbative QCD and
nuclear phenomenology which includes both nuclear matter and finite nuclei. We
develop a microscopic covariant description of nuclear many-body dynamics
constrained by chiral symmetry and in-medium QCD sum rules. A relativistic
point-coupling model is derived, based on an effective Lagrangian with
density-dependent contact interactions between nucleons. These interactions are
constructed from chiral one- and two-pion exchange, combined with the large
isoscalar nucleon self-energies that arise through changes in the quark
condensate and the quark density at finite baryon density. Nuclear binding and
saturation are almost completely generated by chiral (two-pion exchange)
fluctuations in combination with Pauli effects, whereas strong scalar and
vector fields of about equal magnitude and opposite sign, induced by changes of
the QCD vacuum in the presence of baryonic matter, generate the large effective
spin-orbit potential in finite nuclei. Promising results are found for the
nuclear matter equation of state and for the bulk and single-nucleon properties
of finite nuclei.
