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.
We compute the coefficients of the effective mass operator of the 1/Nc expansion for negative parity L=1 excited baryons using the Isgur-Karl model in order to compare the general approach, where the coefficients are obtained by fitting to data, with
a specific constituent quark model calculation. We discuss the physics behind the fitted coefficients for the scalar part of the most general two-body quark-quark interaction. We find that both pion exchange and gluon exchange lead to the dominance of the same operator at the level of the effective mass operator, which is also observed from data.
We discuss the matching of the quark model to the effective mass operator of the 1/Nc expansion using the permutation group S_N. As an illustration of the general procedure we perform the matching of the Isgur-Karl model for the spectrum of the negat
ive parity L=1 excited baryons. Assuming the most general two-body quark Hamiltonian, we derive two correlations among the masses and mixing angles of these states which should hold in any quark model. These correlations constrain the mixing angles and can be used to test for the presence of three-body quark forces.
