The nucleon-nucleon interaction and the role of the [42] orbital six-quark symmetry

The short-range part of the nucleon-nucleon interaction is treated in the one-quark and gluon-exchange approximation. The S-wave phase shifts are calculated using the resonating group method. The nucleon-nucleon, ΔΔ and hidden color channels are taken into account. The spatial symmetry [42] is slightly preferred over the fully orbital symmetric state by the larger probability (89%) with which it is contained asymptotically in the nucleon-nucleon channel and by the quark-quark interaction. The orbital [42] symmetry requires a node in the relative S-wave function between the two nucleons. This yields a hard-core phase shift for the singlet and triplet S-waves.