Three-body force

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A conjectural example of an interaction between two neutrons and a proton.

A three-body force is a force that does not exist in a system of two objects but appears in a three-body system. In general, if the behaviour of a system of more than two objects cannot be described by the two-body interactions between all possible pairs, as a first approximation, the deviation is mainly due to a three-body force.

The fundamental strong interaction seems to exhibits such behaviours. This is fundamentally due to the fact that gluons, the mediators of the strong interaction, can couple to themselves. In particle physics, the interactions between the three quarks that compose hadrons can be described in a diquark model which might be equivalent to the hypothesis of a three-body force. There is growing evidence in the field of nuclear physics that three-body forces exist among the nucleons inside atomic nuclei (three-nucleon force).

[edit] See also

• N-body problem
• Few-body systems
• Faddeev equation

[edit] References

• B.A. Loiseau and Y. Nogami, "Three-Nucleon Force", Nucl. Phys. B2, 470 (1967).
• H. Witala, W. Glöckle, D. Hüber, J. Golak, and H. Kamada, "Cross Section Minima in Elastic Nd Scattering: Possible Evidence for Three-Nucleon Force Effects", Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1183 (1998).
• E. Epelbaum, A. Nogga, W. Glöckle, H. Kamada, Ulf-G. Meissner, and H. Witala, "Three-nucleon forces from chiral effective field theory", Phys. Rev. C 66, 064001 (2002).
• P. Mermod et al., "Search for three-body force effects in neutron-deuteron scattering at 95 MeV", Phys. Lett. B 597, 243 (2004).

This physics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.