  Chiral effective field theories have been used with success in the study of
nuclear structure. It is of interest to systematically improve these energy
functionals (particularly that of quantum hadrodynamics) through the inclusion
of many-body correlations. One possible source of improvement is the loop
expansion. Using the techniques of Infrared Regularization, the short-range,
local dynamics at each order in the loops is absorbed into the parameterization
of the underlying effective lagrangian. The remaining nonlocal, exchange
correlations must be calculated explicitly. Given that the interactions of
quantum hadrodynamics are relatively soft, the loop expansion may be manageable
or even perturbative in nuclear matter. This work investigates the role played
by the three-loop contributions to the loop expansion for quantum
hadrodynamics.
