Theses and Dissertations Collection

During the past three decades, it has been demonstrated that chiral effective field theory (EFT) represents a powerful tool to deal with hadronic interactions at low energy in a systematic and model-independent way. Within the last decade, precision nucleon-nucleon (NN) potentials based upon chiral EFT have been constructed. Most of these potentials have been represented in momentum-space. However, there are some important applications in nuclear physics for which a representation of the NN potential in position space is preferred. Therefore, in this thesis, a NN potential is constructed that is local and given in position space in a relatively simple form. In terms of the chiral expansion, we advance to next-to-next-to-leading order and achieve accuracy that is superior to similar potentials constructed by other researchers. Our potential will serve as an excellent starting point for ab initio few- and many- body calculations in nuclear physics.