Peripheral Nucleon-Nucleon Phase Shifts and Chiral Symmetry

Within the one-loop approximation of baryon chiral perturbation theory we calculate all one-pion and two-pion exchange contributions to the nucleon-nucleon interaction. In fact we construct the elastic NN-scattering amplitude up to and including third order in small momenta. The phase shifts with orbital angular momentum $L\geq2$ and the mixing angles with $J\geq2$ are given parameterfree and thus allow for a detailed test of chiral symmetry in the two-nucleon system. We find that for the D-waves the $2\pi$-exchange corrections are too large as compared with empirical phase shifts, signaling the increasing importance of shorter range effects in lower partial waves. For higher partial waves, especially for G-waves, the model independent $2\pi$-exchange corrections bring the chiral prediction close to empirical NN phase shifts. We propose to use the chiral NN phase shifts with $L\geq 3$ as input in a future phase shift analysis. Furthermore, we compute the irreducible two-pion exchange NN-potentials in coordinate space. They turn out to be of van-der-Waals type, with exponential screening of two-pion mass range.