  A relativistic light front formulation of nuclear dynamics is developed and
applied to treating infinite nuclear matter in a method which includes the
correlations of pairs of nucleons: this is light front Brueckner theory. We
start with a hadronic meson-baryon Lagrangian that is consistent with chiral
symmetry. This is used to obtain a light front version of a one-boson-exchange
nucleon-nucleon potential (OBEP). The accuracy of our description of the
nucleon-nucleon (NN) data is good, and similar to that of other relativistic
OBEP models. We derive, within the light front formalism, the Hartree-Fock and
Brueckner Hartree-Fock equations. Applying our light front OBEP, the nuclear
matter saturation properties are reasonably well reproduced. We obtain a value
of the compressibility, 180 MeV, that is smaller than that of alternative
relativistic approaches to nuclear matter in which the compressibility usually
comes out too large. Because the derivation starts from a meson-baryon
Lagrangian, we are able to show that replacing the meson degrees of freedom by
a NN interaction is a consistent approximation, and the formalism allows one to
calculate corrections to this approximation in a well-organized manner. The
simplicity of the vacuum in our light front approach is an important feature in
allowing the derivations to proceed. The mesonic Fock space components of the
nuclear wave function are obtained also, and aspects of the meson and nucleon
plus-momentum distribution functions are computed. We find that there are about
0.05 excess pions per nucleon.
