  Recently, a new generation of nuclear forces has been developed in the
framework of chiral EFT. An important feature of these potentials is a novel
semi-local regularization approach that combines the advantages of a local
regulator for long-range interactions with the convenience of an
angle-independent nonlocal regulator for contact interactions. The authors
discuss the key features of the semi-local two-nucleon potentials and
demonstrate their outstanding performance in the two-nucleon sector by showing
selected results up to fifth order in the EFT expansion. Also reviewed are
applications to heavier systems, which are currently limited to third chiral
order. This limitation reflects the conceptual difficulty in constructing a
consistently regularized many-body forces and current operators and affects all
currently available interactions. The authors outline possible ways to tackle
this problem and discuss future directions in the field.
