Soft two-meson-exchange nucleon-nucleon potentials. II. One-pair and two-pair diagrams

Abstract

Two-meson-exchange nucleon-nucleon potentials are derived where either one or both nucleons contains a pair vertex. Physically, the meson-pair vertices are meant to describe in an effective way (part of) the effects of heavy-meson exchange and meson-nucleon resonances. {}From the point of view of ``duality,'' these two kinds of contribution are roughly equivalent. The various possibilities for meson pairs coupling to the nucleon are inspired by the chiral-invariant phenomenological Lagrangians that have appeared in the literature. The coupling constants are fixed using the linear $\sigma$ model. We show that the inclusion of these two-meson exchanges gives a significant improvement over a potential model including only the standard one-boson exchanges.