It is often assumed that few- and many-body systems can be accurately described by considering only pairwise two-body interactions of the constituents. We illustrate that three- and higher-body forces enter naturally in effective field theories and are especially prominent in strongly interacting quantum systems. We focus on three-body forces and discuss examples from atomic and nuclear physics. In particular, the importance and the challenges of three-nucleon forces for nuclear structure and reactions, including applications to astrophysics and fundamental symmetries, are highlighted.
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Hammer et al. (2013) studied this question.