Study of bound and scattering states in three-nucleon systems

Abstract A variational technique to describe the ground state and scattering states below the break-up threshold for a three-nucleon system is developed. The method consists in expanding the wave function in terms of correlated harmonic hyperspherical functions suitable to handle the large repulsion contained in the nuclear potential at short distances; three-body forces have also been considered. The inclusion of the pp Coulomb repulsion in the p-d processes does not cause any particular problem, since no partial wave decomposition of the interaction is performed. Accurate numerical results are given for ground state properties and scattering lengths, phase shifts and mixing parameters at three different energies of the incident nucleon. The agreement with other available results and with experimental analyses is highly satisfactory.