Chiral Symmetry and the Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction

The main progress in the field of nucleon-nucleon (NN) potentials, which we have seen in recent years, is the construction of some very quantitative (high-quality/high-precision) NN potentials. These potentials will serve as excellent input for microscopic nuclear structure calculations and will allow for a systematic investigation of off-shell effects. After this enormous quantitative work, it is now time to re-think the NN problem in fundamental terms. We need a derivation of the nuclear force which observes Lorentz invariance and the symmetries of QCD.