On the Meson Theory of Nuclear Forces

Abstract

The failure of the Møller-Rosenfeld-Schwinger mixture to yield quantitative agreement with the observed properties of the proton-neutron system suggests the possibility that this agreement might be obtained with other such mixtures in which tensor force singularities are cancelled. Several such possibilities exist involving vector, pseudovector, and pseudoscalar mesons, certain of which possess the characteristic that they yield a finite tensor and central interaction in the limit where the meson masses approach equality and the square of the coupling constant increases indefinitely inversely as the difference in masses. The resultant interaction is of an especially simple form so that it was felt warranted to carry out calculations on the proton-neutron and proton-proton systems in spite of admitted conceptual difficulties concerning the result. These calculations indicated that satisfactory agreement with experimental results cannot be obtained with these limiting forms of the interaction, if one employs in the theory the mass of observed cosmic ray mesons. Substantially better agreement can be obtained with a meson mass of the order of 300 electron masses.