  The standard way to demonstrate the relevance of chiral symmetry for the NN
interaction is to consider higher partial waves of NN scattering which are
controlled entirely by chiral pion-exchanges (since contacts vanish). However,
in applications of NN-potentials to nuclear structure and reactions, the lower
partial waves are the important ones, making the largest contributions. Lower
partial waves are sensitive to the short-range potential, and so, when the
short-range contacts were to dominate over the chiral pion-contributions in
lower partial waves, then the predictions from "chiral potentials" would have
little to do with chiral symmetry. To address this issue, we investigate
systematically the role of the (chiral) one- and two-pion exchanges, on the one
hand, and the effect of the contacts, on the other hand, in the lower partial
waves of NN scattering. We are able to clearly identify the signature of chiral
symmetry in lower partial waves. Our study has also a pedagogical spin-off as
it demonstrates in detail how the reproduction of the lower partial-wave phase
shifts comes about from the various ingredients of the theory.

Nuclear Theory;Nuclear Experiment