Spectroscopic basis for short-range three-nucleon forces

Abstract

We introduce a spectroscopic basis for the subleading contact three-nucleon forces, which allows one to classify these interactions according to the total angular momentum and parity quantum numbers in a transparent way. Using this new basis, we explore the sensitivity of nucleon-deuteron observables to the three-nucleon short-range interactions. The low dimensionality of the variable-parameter space in the spectroscopic basis allows us to build a simple nucleon-deuteron scattering emulator using radial basis function interpolation. We perform exploratory fits of the subleading contact three-nucleon interactions and demonstrate that 9 of 13 low-energy constants can be reliably determined from elastic nucleon-deuteron scattering data.