Description of intermediate- and short-range NN nuclear force within a covariant effective field theory

The present paper is aimed to developing an effective field theory in the GeV region to describe consistently both elastic and inelastic NN scattering in a fully covariant way. In this development we employ our novel s-channel mechanism of NN interaction at intermediate and short ranges assuming a formation of the six-quark bag dressed with basic meson fields such as π, σ, ρ, and ω in the intermediate state. The peripheral part of the interaction is governed by t-channel one- and two-pion exchanges described fairly well by chiral perturbation theory. The σ-meson dressing should be especially important for the stabilization of the bag due to a high coupling constant of the σ-meson with the bag and also a strong interaction between the σ-field and space symmetric quark core |s6[6]〉. This stabilization of the intermediate dressed bag (which shifts the mass of the bag downward to NN threshold) will be crucially important for the description of π, 2π, ρ, and ω-meson production in NN collisions, and, in particular, for the correct description of π0 production near threshold. So that, we expect that the results of the present work will lead to a deeper understanding the short- and intermediate-range nuclear forces and internucleon correlations in nuclei.