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Operator product expansion and the short distance behavior of 3-flavor baryon potentials

The short distance behavior of baryon-baryon potentials defined through Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave functions is investigated using the operator product expansion. In a previous analysis of the nucleon-nucleon case, corresponding to the SU(3) channels $27_s$ and $\overline{10}_a$, we argued that the potentials have a repulsive core. A new feature occurs for the case of baryons made up of three flavors: manifestly asymptotically attractive potentials appear in the singlet and octet channels. Attraction in the singlet channel was first indicated by quark model considerations, and recently been found in numerical lattice simulations. The latter have however not yet revealed asymptotic attraction in the octet channels; we give a speculative explanation for this apparent discrepancy.