A New Look into the Partial Wave Decomposition of Three-Nucleon Forces

Abstract

We demonstrate that the partial wave decomposition of three-nucleon forces used up to now in momentum space has to be necessarily unstable at high partial waves. This does not affect the applications performed up to now, which were restricted to low partial waves. We present a new way to perform the partial wave decomposition which is free of that defect. This is exemplified for the most often used $2\pi$-exchange Tuscon-Melbourne three-nucleon force. For the lower partial waves the results of the old method are reproduced.