On the role of non-additive interactions in three-body recombination

Non-additive forces are a cornerstone of molecular spectroscopy and reaction dynamics. However, the relevance of non-additive forces in three-body recombination remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present a global study on the impact of non-additive interactions in three-body recombination: atom-atom-atom and ion-atom-atom. Our study explores these reactions in a wide range of energies, from the cold to the hyperthermal regime, finding no effect of non-additive interactions. Therefore, pair-wise interactions are enough to describe the three-body recombination dynamics adequately. At low collision energies, three-body recombination is described by pair-wise interactions, whereas, at high collision energies, the same reaction slightly depends on the non-additive interaction.