Hyperonic Softening versus Nucleonic Three-Body Repulsion in Hypernuclear Matter within a microscopic approach

Abstract

We investigate cold homogeneous matter composed of neutrons, protons, and $\Lambda$ hyperons within our hyperonic extension of the lowest-order constrained variational (LOCV) method, hereafter denoted LOCVY. Our earlier LOCVY calculation, based on two-baryon interactions, is extended by supplementing the Argonne $v_{18}$ nucleonic interaction with the Urbana IX three-nucleon force, reduced within the variational framework to a correlation-weighted density-dependent effective two-nucleon interaction. The $N\Lambda$ and $\Lambda \Lambda$ interactions are kept unchanged, allowing the present calculation to isolate the competition between hyperon-induced softening and nucleonic three-body repulsion. The energy per baryon is calculated for fixed $\Lambda$ fractions $Y_{\Lambda }=0$, $0.1$, and $0.2$ in matter with a symmetric nucleonic component and in the proton-free neutron--$\Lambda$ limit. Direct differences between calculations with and without the three-body force quantify its density-dependent contribution, while a complementary decomposition into $NN$, $N\Lambda$, and $\Lambda \Lambda$ terms identifies the microscopic origin of the stiffening. The Urbana contribution becomes increasingly repulsive with density and opposes, but does not generically remove, the softening associated with a finite $\Lambda$ content. We further investigate the saturation properties for several prescribed $\Lambda$ fractions, with and without the nucleonic three-body force, to clarify how strangeness and many-body interactions modify the saturation point and the agreement with empirical nuclear-matter properties.