DOES THE 3N FORCE HAVE A HARD-CORE

The meson-nucleon dynamics that generates the hard core of the RuhrPot two-nucleon interaction is shown to vanish in the irreducible 3N forc e. This result indicates a small 3N force dominated by conventional li ght meson-exchange dynamics and holds for an arbitrary meson-theoretic Lagrangian. The resulting RuhrPot 3N force is defined in the Appendix . A completely different result is expected when the Tamm-Dancoff-Bloc h-Horowitz procedure is used to define the NN and 3N potentials. In th at approach (e.g., full Bonn potential), both the NN and 3N potentials contain nonvanishing contributions from the coherent sum of meson-rec oil dynamics and the possibility of a large hard core requiring explic it calculation cannot be ruled out.