Physical systems characterized by a shallow two-body bound or virtual state are governed at large distances by a continuous-scale invariance, which is broken to a discrete one when three or more particles come into play. This symmetry induces a universal behavior for different systems, independent of the details of the underlying interaction, rooted in the smallness of the ratio $ell/a_B ll 1$, where the length $a_B$ is associated to the binding energy of the two-body system $E_2=hbar^2/m a_B^2$ and $ell$ is the natural length given by the interaction range. Efimov physics refers to this universal behavior, which is often hidden by the on-set of system-specific non-universal effects. In this work we identify universal properties by providing an explicit link of physical systems to their unitary limit, in which $a_Brightarrowinfty$, and show that nuclear systems belong to this class of universality.
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