No Arabic abstract
The operator structures that can contribute to three-nucleon forces are classified in the 1/Nc expansion. At leading order in 1/Nc a spin-flavor independent term is present, as are the spin-flavor structures associated with the Fujita-Miyazawa three-nucleon force. Modern phenomenological three-nucleon forces are thus consistent with this O(Nc) leading force, corrections to which are suppressed by a power series in 1/Nc^2. A complete basis of operators for the three-nucleon force, including all independent momentum structures, is given explicitly up to next-to-leading order in the 1/Nc expansion.
The partial decay widths of lowest lying negative parity baryons belonging to the 70-plet of SU(6) are analyzed in the framework of the 1/Nc expansion The channels considered are those with single pseudo-scalar meson emission. The analysis is carried out to sub-leading order in 1/Nc and to first order in SU(3) symmetry breaking. Conclusions about the magnitude of SU(3) breaking effects along with predictions for some unknown or poorly determined partial decay widths of known resonances are obtained.
Several experimental investigations have observed parity violation in nuclear systems-a consequence of the weak force between quarks. We apply the $1/N_c$ expansion of QCD to the P-violating T-conserving component of the nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential. We show there are two leading-order operators, both of which affect $vec{p}p$ scattering at order $N_c$. We find an additional four operators at $O(N_c^0 sin^2 theta_W)$ and six at $O(1/N_c)$. Pion exchange in the PV NN force is suppressed by $1/N_c$ and $sin^2 theta_W$, providing a quantitative explanation for its non-observation up to this time. The large-$N_c$ hierarchy of other PV NN force mechanisms is consistent with estimates of the couplings in phenomenological models. The PV observed in $vec{p}p$ scattering data is compatible with natural values for the strong and weak coupling constants: there is no evidence of fine tuning.
We apply the large-$N_c$ expansion to the time-reversal-invariance-violating (TV) nucleon-nucleon potential. The operator structures contributing to next-to-next-to-leading order in the large-$N_c$ counting are constructed. For the TV and parity-violating case we find a single operator structure at leading order. The TV but parity-conserving potential contains two leading-order terms, which however are suppressed by 1/$N_c$ compared to the parity-violating potential. Comparison with phenomenological potentials, including the chiral EFT potential in the TV parity-violating case, leads to large-$N_c$ scaling relations for TV meson-nucleon and nucleon-nucleon couplings.
We explore the constraints on the three-nucleon force (3NF) of chiral effective field theory ($chi$EFT) that are provided by bound-state observables in the $A=3$ and $A=4$ sectors. Our statistically rigorous analysis incorporates experimental error, computational method uncertainty, and the uncertainty due to truncation of the $chi$EFT expansion at next-to-next-to-leading order. A consistent solution for the ${}^3$H binding energy, the ${}^4$He binding energy and radius, and the ${}^3$H $beta$-decay rate can only be obtained if $chi$EFT truncation errors are included in the analysis. All of these except the $beta$-decay rate give essentially degenerate constraints on the 3NF low-energy constants, so it is crucial for estimating these parameters. We use eigenvector continuation for fast and accurate emulation of No-Core Shell Model calculations of the considered few-nucleon observables. This facilitates sampling of the posterior probability distribution, allowing us to also determine the distributions of the hyperparameters that quantify the truncation error. We find a $chi$EFT expansion parameter of $Q=0.33 pm 0.06$ for these observables.
Three-nucleon forces (3NF) are investigated from two-flavor lattice QCD simulations. We utilize the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter (NBS) wave function to determine two-nucleon forces (2NF) and 3NF in the same framework. As a first exploratory study, we extract 3NF in which three nucleons are aligned linearly with an equal spacing. This is the simplest geometrical configuration which reduces the huge computational cost of calculating the NBS wave function. Quantum numbers of the three-nucleon system are chosen to be (I, J^P)=(1/2,1/2^+) (the triton channel). Lattice QCD simulations are performed using N_f=2 dynamical clover fermion configurations at the lattice spacing of a = 0.156 fm on a 16^3 x 32 lattice with a large quark mass corresponding to m_pi= 1.13 GeV. We find repulsive 3NF at short distance in the triton channel. Several sources of systematic errors are also discussed.