A New Look at the Nuclear Force

Once the boson resonances were discovered, the first part of the Taketani program-the calculation of the peripheral region of the nuclear force-achieved a quantitative success. Calculations of the dynamical (two-pion-exchange) region have proved much more difficult. By 1975 increasingly sophisticated dispersiontheoretic calculations coupled with increasingly accurate measurements of ~7r parameters have led to convergence of the predictions made by the two most persistent groups (Stony Brook and Paris). These predictions agree with each other, and with much experimental evidence. A lot of the uncertainty in the phenomenological w-meson cutoff has been removed by fitting a single vector meson renormalization parameter to high energy nucleon electromagnetic form factor data. Nevertheless, it appears likely that quantitative predictions of the deuteron and “singlet deuteron” binding energies and low energy properties will continue to require adjustment of sensitive, and ambiguous, phenomenological parameters. In contrast, a straightforward application of the covariant singular core model1 to the NNn system predicts both binding energies within one percent of their empirical values. 2 The three constants required for each calculation are obtained directly from experiment with no adjustment of parameters. The