One-boson exchange potentials and nucleon-antinucleon scattering

Recently, there have been several suggestions that low-energy nucleon-antinucleon (N N) resonances might exist. They were based on the real part of the Bryan-Phillips potential, while the absorptive part was taken as a small perturbation. We re-examine the N N scattering, taking into account the whole Bryan-Phillips potential. We find, as others, that the real part, the one-boson exchange potential (OBEP), produces many resonances. However, the inclusion of the dominant absorptive part eliminates all of them. In addition, we find that the N N scattering is sensitive to the unknown, short-range behaviour of this OBEP and, therefore, we question its predictive reliability. We argue that, if experimentally one finds N N low-energy resonances, we would be able to learn more about the short-range behaviour of the OBEP.