Signatures of three-nucleon interactions in few-nucleon systems

TL;DR

This review discusses the importance of three-nucleon interactions in accurately describing three-body nuclear systems, highlighting recent experimental and theoretical progress and ongoing discrepancies despite advancements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental and theoretical developments in understanding three-nucleon forces in few-nucleon systems.

Findings

Three-nucleon forces are essential for accurate descriptions of three-body systems.

Despite progress, significant discrepancies between data and calculations remain.

High-precision experiments and models reveal limitations of two-body force models.

Abstract

Recent experimental results in three-body systems have unambiguously shown that calculations based only on nucleon-nucleon forces fail to accurately describe many experimental observables and one needs to include effects which are beyond the realm of the two-body potentials. This conclusion owes its significance to the fact that experiments and calculations can both be performed with a high accuracy. In this review, both theoretical and experimental achievements of the past decade will be underlined. Selected results will be presented. The discussion on the effects of the three-nucleon forces is, however, limited to the hadronic sector. It will be shown that despite the major successes in describing these seemingly simple systems, there are still clear discrepancies between data and the state-of-the-art calculations.