Soliton interactions from low-energy meson phenomenology

We construct an effective Lagrangian with the low-mass mesons (π, ρ, A1, ω, and the scalar meson ε). The vector-meson fields are introduced as gauge fields in the linear σ model instead of the nonlinear σ model. The parameters of the model are fixed by fitting to the low-energy meson observables. We then look for topological soliton solutions of the model and investigate the nucleon-nucleon interaction in the product approximation. The results show that the scalar degrees of freedom (i) lower significantly the soliton mass and (ii) give rise to attractive NN forces in contrast with the vector mesons which yield only repulsive forces