Two pion exchange nucleon-nucleon potential: The minimal chiral model

Abstract

We evaluate the two pion exchange contribution to the nucleon-nucleon potential in configuration space using a minimal chiral model containing only pions and nucleons. The scalar-isoscalar component of the interaction is relatively small, due to cancellations between large terms, and fails to reproduce the intermediate range attraction in the central channel. We show that these results do not depend on how chiral symmetry is implemented.