Abstract
We present calculations of the energy per particle of pure neutron and symmetric nuclear matter with simplified Argonne nucleon-nucleon potentials for different many-body theories. We compare critically the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock results to other formalisms, such as the Brueckner-Bethe-Goldstone expansion up to third order, self-consistent Green's functions, auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo, and Fermi hypernetted chain. We evaluate the importance of spin-orbit and tensor correlations in the equation of state and find these to be important in a wide range of densities.