Chiral perturbation theory in a nuclear background

We propose a novel way to formulate chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) in a nuclear background, characterized by a static, non-uniform distribution of the baryon number that describes the finite nucleus. In the limiting case of a uniform distribution, the theory reduces to the well-known zero-temperature in-medium ChPT. The proposed approach is used to calculate the self-energy of the charged pion in the background of the heavy nucleus at O(p(5)) in the chiral expansion, and to derive the leading terms of the pion-nucleus optical potential.