Systematic Nuclear Uncertainties in the Hypertriton System

TL;DR

This study uses ab initio calculations with chiral effective field theory interactions to quantify nuclear-physics uncertainties in hypertriton binding energy predictions, highlighting their significance for constraining hyperon-nucleon interactions.

Contribution

It provides a systematic analysis of nuclear-physics uncertainties affecting hypertriton binding energy predictions using the no-core shell model with realistic interactions.

Findings

Uncertainty in hypertriton binding energy is about 100 keV.

Sensitivity of binding energy to nuclear interactions matches experimental uncertainties.

Hypertriton binding energy can be used to calibrate hyperon-nucleon interactions.

Abstract

The hypertriton bound state is relevant for inference of knowledge about the hyperon-nucleon (YN) interaction. In this work we compute the binding energy of the hypertriton using the ab initio hypernuclear no-core shell model (NCSM) with realistic interactions derived from chiral effective field theory. In particular, we employ a large family of nucleon-nucleon interactions with the aim to quantify the theoretical precision of predicted hypernuclear observables arising from nuclear-physics uncertainties. The three-body calculations are performed in a relative Jacobi-coordinate harmonic oscillator basis and we implement infrared correction formulas to extrapolate the NCSM results to infinite model space. We find that the spread of the predicted hypertriton binding energy, attributed to the nuclear-interaction model uncertainty, is about 100 keV. In conclusion, the sensitivity of the hypertriton binding energy to nuclear-physics uncertainties is of the same order of magnitude as experimental uncertainties such that this bound-state observable can be used in the calibration procedure to constrain the YN interactions.