Abstract
We analyze the large- Nc structure of the baryon-baryon potential derived in the framework of SU(3) chiral perturbation theory up to next-to-leading order including contact interactions as well as one-meson and two-meson exchange diagrams. Moreover, we assess the impact of SU(3) symmetry breaking from a large- Nc perspective and show that the leading order results can successfully be applied to the hyperon-nucleon potential. Our results include a reduction of the number of relevant low-energy constants of the leading order contact interaction from fifteen to three, and we show that consistency is preserved if the F/D ratio is given by 2/3 and the C/D ratio for the baryon decuplet-to-octet coupling is given by 2.