Renormalization of One Meson Exchange Potentials and Their Currents

Abstract

The Nucleon-Nucleon One Meson Exchange Potential, its wave functions and related Meson Exchange Currents are analyzed for point-like nucleons. The leading Nc contributions generate a local and energy independent potential which presents 1/r^3 singularities, requiring renormalization. We show how invoking suitable boundary conditions, neutron-proton phase shifts and deuteron properties become largely insensitive to the nucleon substructure and to the vector mesons. Actually, reasonable agreement with low energy data for realistic values of the coupling constants (e.g. SU(3) values) is found. The analysis along similar lines for the Meson Exchange Currents suggests that this renormalization scheme implies tremendous simplifications while complying with exact gauge invariance at any stage of the calculation.