Deuteron Binding Energy and the Tjon Line as Non-Markovian Spectral Memory Effects (Paper LVII)

This paper (Paper LVII in the History-Dependent Gravity series) presents a paradigm shift in the description of low-energy nuclear forces. Modern chiral effective field theory (χEFT) describes nuclear interactions using a hierarchy of local contact operators that must be empirically fitted, leaving the physical origin of short-distance nonlocality unspecified. We demonstrate that the entire low-energy two-nucleon sector, and its extension to few-body systems, emerges from a universal non-Markovian spectral memory kernel, ρ(μ)ρ(μ), which encodes the influence of the spacetime background on nucleonic subsystems. Unlike the analytic derivative expansion of chi-EFT, this spectral kernel generates intrinsic non-analytic structures (e.g., branch cuts proportional to k^2 log(-k^2)) that cannot be reproduced by any finite set of local operators. Key Results: Parameter-Free Prediction of BdBd: We identify a universal spectral invariant, I=∫0∞ρ(μ)/μ2dμI=∫0∞ρ(μ)/μ2dμ, which is uniquely determined solely by empirical two-body scattering data (scattering length aa and effective range rere). Using this fixed invariant, the deuteron binding energy (Bd=2.22Bd=2.22 MeV) and asymptotic normalization constant (ASAS) emerge as self-consistent predictions without any additional free parameters. Emergence of the Tjon Line: Extending this framework, we show that the empirical Tjon line correlation between triton (B3B3) and helium-4 (B4B4) binding energies arises naturally from the collective amplification of this same spectral invariant, governed purely by geometric combinatorial factors. This work provides a falsifiable, parameter-free explanation of few-body nuclear universality. It suggests that what appears in conventional EFT as independent three-body forces (3NF) are, in reality, emergent collective effects of a single, universal non-Markovian spacetime memory.