The first measurement of the three-body photodisintegration of longitudinally-polarized 3 He with a circularly-polarized γ-ray beam was carried out at the High Intensity γ-ray Source (HIγS) facility located at Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL). The spin-dependent double-differential cross sections and the contributions from the three-body photodisintegration to the 3 He GDH integrand are presented and compared with state-of-the-art three-body calculations at the incident photon energies of 12.8 and 14.7 MeV. The data reveal the importance of including the Coulomb interaction between protons in three-body calculations.PACS numbers: 24.70.+s, 25.10.+s, 25.20.Dc, 29.25.Pj, 29.27.Hj, 29.40.Mc, 67.30.ep The study of three-nucleon systems has long been of fundamental importance to nuclear physics [1,2]. Calculations using mainly the machinery of Faddeev [3] and Alt-Grassberger-Sandhas equations (AGS) [4] have been carried out for three-body systems using a variety of nucleon-nucleon (NN) potentials [5,6], and three-nucleon forces (3NFs) like Urbana IX (UIX) [8] or CD Bonn + ∆ [9], with the latter yielding an effective 3NF through the ∆-isobar excitation.Calculations for the three-body photodisintegration of 3 He with double polarizations have been carried out. The calculations by Deltuva et al. are based on AGS equations and employ the CD Bonn + ∆ potential [9] with the corresponding single-baryon and mesonexchange electromagnetic currents (MEC) plus relativistic single-nucleon charge corrections. The results are obtained using the computational technology of Ref. [10]. The proton-proton Coulomb force is included using the method of screening and renormalization [11]. Skibiński et al. solve the Faddeev equations by using the AV18 potential and the UIX 3NF [8] accounting for single nucleon currents and the two most important MEC, the seagull and pion-in-flight terms. Their results are obtained using the methods described in Ref. [12].Recent advances in high intensity polarized beams and polarized 3 He targets allow for tests of new spindependent observables predicted by theory. A polarized 3 He target is often used as an effective polarized neutron target to extract the electromagnetic form factors [13][14][15] and the spin structure functions [16] of the neutron since the nuclear spin of 3 He is carried mostly by the unpaired neutron. To acquire the information about the neutron using a polarized 3 He target, nuclear corrections relying on the state-of-the-art three-body calculations need to be validated by experiments. While data from electrodisintegration of polarized 3 He [17] were used to test three-body calculations [18], data from polarized photodisintegration of 3 He below the pion production threshold did not exist prior to this work.The spin-dependent total cross sections from the threebody photodisintegration of 3 He below pion production threshold are of further importance for the investigation of the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn (GDH) sum rule [19]. The GDH sum rule relates the energy-weighted di...