  Relativistic energy density functionals (EDF) have become a standard tool for
nuclear structure calculations, providing a complete and accurate, global
description of nuclear ground states and collective excitations. Guided by the
medium dependence of the microscopic nucleon self-energies in nuclear matter,
semi-empirical functionals have been adjusted to the nuclear matter equation of
state and to bulk properties of finite nuclei, and applied to studies of
arbitrarily heavy nuclei, exotic nuclei far from stability, and even systems at
the nucleon drip-lines. REDF-based structure models have also been developed
that go beyond the static mean-field approximation, and include collective
correlations related to the restoration of broken symmetries and to
fluctuations of collective variables. These models are employed in analyses of
structure phenomena related to shell evolution, including detailed predictions
of excitation spectra and electromagnetic transition rates.
