The nucleon-nucleon force and the quark degrees of freedom

This review gives a detailed overview of the current status of our understanding of the nucleon-nucleon forces. The authors review the known long-range meson exchange forces and explain how these forces originate from an underlying quark model constrained by chiral symmetry, a symmetry that is very well satisfied in low-energy nuclear phenomena. These effective meson exchange forces describe the large-impact-parameter nucleon-nucleon scattering. The authors show how the small-impact-parameter nucleon-nucleon scattering can be explained by the quark structure of the nucleons and why this quark model is successful in reproducing the energy dependence of the "measured" $S$- and $P$- wave nucleon-nucleon phase shifts.