Consistent Treatment of Pion Exchange Force and Meson versus Quark Dynamics in the Nucleon?Nucleon Interaction

Abstract

To distinguish explicit quark effects from meson exchange in the NN interaction, it is necessary to splice the long-range meson exchange forces and short-distance dynamics due to quarks. However, in most quark model studies the short-range part of the pion exchange is usually treated differently, which makes it difficult to get a uniform picture of the short-range dynamics. We make a comparison between meson exchange and quark-gluon dynamics using the same pion exchange potential based on a quark-pion coupling model. The roles of vector meson exchange and gluon exchange in the NN interaction are compared by calculating NN phase parameters. It is shown that, with this consistent one-pion exchange force, the vector meson exchange gives a better fit to the data. This suggests that non-perturbative mechanisms responsible for meson exchange may need more careful handling to supplement the usual one-gluon exchange mechanism in describing the NN interaction.