Three-nucleon force in relativistic three-nucleon Faddeev calculations

We extend our formulation of relativistic three-nucleon Faddeev equations to include both pairwise interactions and a three-nucleon force. Exact Poincare invariance is realized by adding interactions to the mass Casimir operator (rest Hamiltonian) of the noninteracting system without changing the spin Casimir operator. This is achieved by using interactions defined by rotationally invariant kernels that are functions of internal momentum variables and single-particle spins that undergo identical Wigner rotations. To solve the resulting equations one needs matrix elements of the three-nucleon force with these properties in a momentum-space partial-wave basis. We present two methods to calculate matrix elements of three-nucleon forces with these properties. For a number of examples we show that at higher energies, where effects of relativity and of three-nucleon forces are non-negligible, a consistent treatment of both is required to properly analyze the data.