Chiral three-nucleon force at N^4LO II: Intermediate-range contributions

Understand

We derive the subleading contributions to the two-pion-one-pion exchange and ring three-nucleon force topologies emerging at next-to-next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory.

• The resulting expressions do not involve any unknown parameters.
• To study convergence of the chiral expansion we work out the most general operator structure of a local isospin-invariant three-nucleon force.
• Using the resulting operator basis with 22 independent structures, we compare the strength of the corresponding potentials in configuration space for individual topologies at various orders in the chiral expansion.