I describe recent progress towards a theory of the NN force which captures the consequences of QCD's chiral symmetry and the pattern of its breaking, and is formulated as an expansion in a ratio of low and high mass scales, M_{ lo}/M_{ hi}. This "chiral effective field theory" of the NN system is a firm foundation for explorations of nuclear structure and reactions that are grounded in QCD's low-energy symmetries. While calculations that use a ChiPT expansion for the NN potential have proven very successful, they can only be used with a narrow range of momentum-space cutoffs, which leaves the expansion parameter for observable quantities somewhat murky. Here we seek a truly systematic effective field theory for the NN amplitude, that is manifestly renormalization-group invariant at each order in a demonstrably perturbative expansion.
Categories: nucl-th hep-ph nucl-ex