Off-shell effects and consistency of many-body treatments of dense matter

Effective field theory requires all observables to be independent of the representation used for the quantum field operators. It means that off-shell properties of the interactions should not lead to any observable effects. We analyze this issue in the context of many-body approaches to nuclear matter, where it should be possible to shift the contributions of lowest order in purely off-shell two-body interactions into three-body forces. We show that none of the commonly used truncations of the two-body scattering amplitude such as the ladder, Brueckner-Hartree-Fock, or parquet approximations respect this requirement.