General operator form of the non-local three-nucleon force

This paper describes a procedure to obtain the general form of the three-nucleon force. The result is an operator form where the momentum space matrix element of the three-nucleon potential is written as a linear combination of 320 isospin-spin-momentum operators and scalar functions of momenta. Any spatial and isospin rotation invariant three-nucleon force can be written in this way and in order for the potential to be Hermitian, symmetric under parity inversion, time reversal and particle exchange, the scalar functions must have definite transformation properties under these discrete operations. A complete list of the isospin-spin-momentum operators and scalar function transformation properties is given.