In-Medium Pion Properties from Chiral Perturbation Theory

Two-point functions related to the pion weak decay constant $f_\pi$ are calculated from the generating functional of chiral perturbation theory in the mean field approximation and the heavy-baryon limit. The aim is to demonstrate that Lorentz invariance is violated in the presence of background matter. This fact manifests itself in the splitting of both $f_\pi$ and the pion mass into uncorrelated time- and space-like parts. We emphasize the different in-medium renormalizations of the correlation functions, show the inequivalence between the in-medium values of $f_\pi$ deduced from Walecka-type models, on the one hand, and QCD sum rules, on the other hand, and elaborate on the importance for some nuclear physics observables.