The static three-quark (3Q) potential is studied in SU(3) lattice QCD with 12 3 × 24 and β = 5.7 at the quenched level. From the 3Q Wilson loop, 3Q ground-state potential V3Q is extracted using the smearing technique for ground-state enhancement. With accuracy better than a few %, V3Q is well described by a sum of a constant, the two-body Coulomb term and the three-body linear confinement term σ3QLmin, with Lmin the minimal value of total length of color flux tubes linking the three quarks. Comparing with the Q-Q potential, we find a universal feature of the string tension, σ3Q ≃ σ QQ , and the OGE result for Coulomb coefficients, A3Q ≃ 1 2In usual, the three-body force is regarded as a residual interaction in most fields of physics. In QCD, however, the three-body force among three quarks is expected to be a "primary" force reflecting the SU(3) c gauge symmetry. Indeed, the three quark (3Q) potential [1,2,3] is directly responsible to the structure and properties of baryons [4], similar to the relevant role of the Q-Q potential upon meson properties [5]. In contrast with a number of studies on the Q-Q potential using lattice QCD [6,7], there were only a few lattice QCD studies for the 3Q potential done mainly more than 13 years ago [8,9,10,11]. (In Ref.[11], the author only showed a preliminary result on the equilateral-triangle case without enough analyses.) In Refs. [8,10,11], the 3Q potential seemed to be expressed by a sum of twobody potentials, which supports the ∆-type flux tube picture [12]. On the other hand, Ref. [9] seemed to support the Y-type flux-tube picture [2,4] rather than the ∆-type one. These controversial results may be due to the difficulty of the accurate measurement of the 3Q ground-state potential in lattice QCD. For instance, in Refs. [8,10], the authors did not use the smearing for ground-state enhancement, and therefore their results may include serious contamination from the excited-state component.The 3Q static potential can be measured with the 3Q Wilson loop, where the 3Q gauge-invariant state is generated at t = 0 and is annihilated at t = T , as shown in Fig.1. Here, the three quarks are spatially fixed in R 3 for 0 < t < T . The 3Q Wilson loop W 3Q is defined in a gauge-invariant manner aswithHere, P denotes the path-ordered product along the path denoted by Γ k in Fig.1. Similar to the derivation of the Q-Q potential from the Wilson loop, the 3Q potential V 3Q is obtained asPhysically, the true ground state of the 3Q system, which is of interest here, is expected to be expressed by the flux tubes instead of the strings, and the 3Q state which is expressed by the three strings generally includes many excited-state components such as flux-tube vibrational modes. Of course, if the large T limit can be taken, the ground-state potential would be obtained. However, W 3Q decreases exponentially with T , and then the practical measurement of W 3Q becomes quite severe for large T in lattice QCD simulations. Therefore, for the accurate measurement of the 3Q ground-state potentia...