There are two main reasons for this fact. First, the strong interaction acts essentially among the quarks forming the nucleons. The nucleon–nucleon interaction in vacuum is a mere consequence of the quark–quark interaction. While the latter is well understood in the framework of the Standard Model at high energies, it is much more complicated in low energies due to color confinement and asymptotic freedom. Thus there is yet no fundamental theory allowing one to deduce the nucleon–nucleon interaction from the quark–quark interaction. Furthermore, even if this problem were solved, there would remain a large difference between the ideal (and conceptually simpler) case of two nucleons interacting in vacuum, and that of these nucleons interacting in the nuclear matter. To go further, it was necessary to invent the concept of effective interaction. The latter is basically a mathematical function with several arbitrary parameters, which are adjusted to agree with experimental data.