Three nucleons at very low energies

Abstract

We discuss the effective field theory approach to nuclear phenomena with typical momentum below the pion mass. We particularly focus on the three body problem. In the $J=3/2$ channel,effective field theory is extremelly predictive and we are able to describe the nucleon-deuteron scattering amplitude at the percent level using only two parameters obtained from nucleon-nucleon scattering. We briefly comment onthe $J=1/2$ channel and the issues related to the non-perturbative renormalization of the three body force.