Induced Hyperon-Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions and the Hyperon Puzzle

Abstract

We present the first ab initio calculations for $p$-shell hypernuclei including hyperon-nucleon-nucleon (YNN) contributions induced by a Similarity Renormalization Group transformation of the initial hyperon-nucleon interaction. The transformation including the YNN terms conserves the spectrum of the Hamiltonian while drastically improving model-space convergence of the Importance-Truncated No-Core Shell Model, allowing a precise extraction of binding and excitation energies. Results using a hyperon-nucleon interaction at leading order in chiral effective field theory for lower- to mid-$p$-shell hypernuclei show a good reproduction of experimental excitation energies while hyperon binding energies are typically overestimated. The induced YNN contributions are strongly repulsive and we show that they are related to a decoupling of the $\Sigma$ hyperons from the hypernuclear system, i.e., a suppression of the $\Lambda$-$\Sigma$ conversion terms in the Hamiltonian. This is linked to the so-called hyperon puzzle in neutron-star physics and provides a basic mechanism for the explanation of strong $\Lambda$NN three-baryon forces.