Relativistic nuclear structure. II. Finite nuclei

The Dirac-Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approximation is extended to the calculation of finite nuclei. As an example, the ground-state properties of ${}_{}{}^{16}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{O}$ are studied using modern versions of the one-boson-exchange model for the nucleon-nucleon interaction. The Dirac effect yields a significant increase for the radius of the charge distribution and a moderate gain in binding energy. This improves the agreement with the experimental data considerably, but does not remove the discrepancy between theory and experiment completely.