A first estimation of chiral four-nucleon force effects in 4He

Abstract

We estimate four-nucleon force effects between different 4He wave functions by calculating the expectation values of four-nucleon potentials which were recently derived within the framework of chiral effective field theory. We find that the four-nucleon force is attractive for the wave functions with a totally symmetric momentum part. The additional binding energy provided by the long-ranged part of the four-nucleon force is of the order of a few hundred keV.