Impact of chiral hyperonic three-body forces on neutron stars

Abstract

Abstract.We study the effects of the nucleon-nucleon-lambda (NN$ \Lambda$Λ three-body force on neutron stars. In particular, we consider the NN$ \Lambda$Λ force recently derived by the Jülich-Bonn-Munich group within the framework of chiral effective field theory at next-to-next-to-leading order. This force, together with realistic nucleon-nucleon, nucleon-nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-hyperon interactions, is used to calculate the equation of state and the structure of neutron stars within the many-body non-relativistic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach. Our results show that the inclusion of the NN$ \Lambda$Λ force leads to an equation of state stiff enough such that the resulting neutron star maximum mass is compatible with the largest currently measured ( $ \sim 2 M_\odot$∼2M⊙ neutron star masses. Using a perturbative many-body approach we calculate also the separation energy of the $ \Lambda$Λ in some hypernuclei finding that the agreement with the experimental data improves for the heavier ones when the effect of the NN$ \Lambda$Λ force is taken into account.