Nucleon-nucleon interaction and large Nc QCD -: art. no. 034011

The nature of the nonrelativistic nucleon-nucleon potential in the large-N-c limit is discussed. In particular, we address the consistency of the meson-exchange picture of nucleon interactions. It is shown that the nonrelativistic nucleon-nucleon potential extracted from the Feynmann graphs up to and including two-meson-exchange diagrams satisfies the spin-flavor counting rules of Kaplan and Savage and of Kaplan and Manohar, provided the nucleon momenta is of order N-c(0). The key to this is a cancellation of the retardation effect of the box graphs against the contributions of the crossed-box diagram. The consistency requires including Delta as an intermediate state.