Three-body forces in the quark model

Abstract

We review the connection between constituent-quark Hamiltonians and QCD and investigate the long-standing difficulty of describing meson and baryon spectra with one common two-body interaction. A Hamiltonian calibrated to ground-state mesons leaves systematic baryon mass residuals, largest in the light-quark sector and decreasing toward heavier flavors. We show that a short-range, color-spin-dependent connected three-quark interaction substantially reduces this incompatibility. Mass-scaled finite-range profiles yield high-accuracy baryon spectra, whereas flavor-independent common-range profiles do not remove the residual flavor pattern. The result is tested on additional ground-state baryons outside the calibration set and through meson--baryon compatibility analyses across several alternative quark-model Hamiltonians. We also benchmark radial and orbital excitations to identify the regime in which a static compact valence Hamiltonian remains reliable, and provide explicit color-spin matrix elements for two- and three-body operators in baryons and multiquark configurations. Within the tested valence-space representations, the results indicate that a mass-dependent short-range connected three-quark interaction provides the missing contribution required for a consistent simultaneous description of meson and baryon ground-state spectra.