Three-body forces at work: Three-body potentials derived from triplet correlations in colloidal suspensions

Two- and three-particle correlation functions are computed from video-microscopy data of two-dimensional suspensions of charged colloids and inverted to derive the pair and three-body interaction potentials between the colloidal particles. Our method allows to resolve the full spatial dependence of the three-body potentials. Examining colloidal systems at different colloid densities, we find density-independent, attractive three-body potentials, with a minimum of a few kT that is most pronounced in the equilateral triangle configuration.