N-Body Nuclear Forces at Short Distances in Holographic QCD

TL;DR

This paper calculates short-distance N-body nuclear forces in holographic QCD using the Sakai-Sugimoto model, finding that genuine N-body forces vanish for N>2 at leading order, indicating suppression compared to 2-body forces.

Contribution

It provides the first calculation of classical N-body nuclear forces in holographic QCD, revealing their suppression at leading order for N>2.

Findings

Genuine N-body forces vanish for N>2 at leading order.

Classical N-body forces are suppressed compared to 2-body forces.

Supports the dominance of two-body interactions in nuclear physics.

Abstract

We provide a calculation of N-body (N>2) nucleon interactions at short distances in holographic QCD. In the Sakai-Sugimoto model of large N_c massless QCD, N baryons are described by N Yang-Mills instantons in 5 spacetime dimensions. We compute a classical short distance interaction hamiltonian for N 'tHooft instantons. This corresponds to N baryons sharing identical classical spins and isospins. We find that genuine N-body nuclear forces turn out to vanish for N>2, at the leading order. This suggests that classical N-body forces are always suppressed compared with 2-body forces.