Weakly-Bound Three-Body Systems with No Bound Subsystems

Abstract

We investigate the domain of coupling constants which achieve binding for a 3-body system, while none of the 2-body subsystems is bound. We derive some general properties of the shape of the domain, and rigorous upper bounds on its size, using a Hall--Post decomposition of the Hamiltonian. Numerical illustrations are provided in the case of a Yukawa potential, using a simple variational method.

Comments: gzipped ps with 11 figures included. To appear in Phys. Rev. A