The knowledge of the hadronic forces is one of the cental questions for our understanding of the confined and stable matter. A microscopic and non perturbative theory will hopefully derive these interactions which are, in terms of quarks and gluons, analogous to the valence forces of Van der Waals. But basic problems remain almost fully unsolved: the validity of the constituent quark model, the existence of 3-q forces, the relations between the chiral symmetry, the confinement and the spin-parity of the hadrons, the virtual existence of a strange quark in the proton, etc. An older, alternative approach explains these forces in term of potentials based on the meson exchanges between two nucleons. The main weakness of this point of view is that these exchanges take place over distances which are similar to or smaller than the overlap dimension of the interacting hadrons. An excellent survey and criticism of the present theoretical ideas has been presented by D. Wilkinson [1].
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