The short-range and tensor components of the bare nucleon-nucleon interaction induce a sizeable depletion of low momenta in the ground state of a nuclear many-body system. The self-consistent Greens function method within the ladder approximation provides an textit{ab-initio} description of correlated nuclear systems that accounts properly for these effects. The momentum distribution predicted by this approach is analyzed in detail, with emphasis on the depletion of the lowest momentum state. The temperature, density, and nucleon asymmetry (isospin) dependence of the depletion of the Fermi sea is clarified. A connection is established between the momentum distribution and the time-ordered components of the self-energy, which allows for an improved interpretation of the results. The dependence on the underlying nucleon-nucleon interaction provides quantitative estimates of the importance of short-range and tensor correlations in nuclear systems.
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