Induced hyperon-nucleon-nucleon interactions and the hyperon puzzle

There is a strong experimental and theoretical interest in determining the structure of hypernuclei and the effect of strangeness in strongly interacting many-body systems. Recently, we presented the first calculations of hypernuclei in the p shell from first principles. However, these calculations showed either slow convergence with respect to model-space size or, when the hyperon-nucleon potential is transformed via the Similarity Renormalization Group, strong induced three-body terms. By including these induced hyperon-nucleon-nucleon (YNN) terms explicitly, we get precise binding and excitation energies. We present first results for p-shell hypernuclei and discuss the origin of the YNN terms, which are mainly driven by the evolution of the Λ-Σ conversion terms. We find that they are tightly connected to the hyperon puzzle, a long-standing issue where the appearance of hyperons in models of neutron star matter lowers the predicted maximum neutron star mass below the bound set by the heaviest observed objects.