Exploring the potential of antihyperons in nuclei with antiprotons

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method using hyperon-antihyperon pair production near threshold in antiproton-nucleus interactions to investigate antihyperon potentials in nuclei, demonstrating potential sensitivity for certain particle pairs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach utilizing transverse momentum correlations to study antihyperon-nucleus interactions, with simulations showing its effectiveness for specific hyperon pairs.

Findings

Transverse momentum correlations can reveal potential differences between hyperons and antihyperons.

The method shows promise for $ar{\Xi}$ potential studies at certain energies.

Sensitivity varies depending on the particle pair and production energy.

Abstract

A simple method to explore the interaction of antihyperons in nuclei by exclusive hyperon-antihyperon pair production close to threshold in antiproton nucleus interactions is proposed. Due to energy and momentum conservation event-by-event transverse momentum correlations of the produced hyperons and antihyperons contain information on the difference between their potentials. A schematic Monte Carlo simulation is used to illustrate the sensitivities of the proposed method for the reaction 1.66GeV/c antiproton+$^{12}$C $\to {\Lambda\bar{\Lambda}}$. For produced D-meson pairs at 6.7GeV/c the sensitivity of the transverse momenta correlation will probably be to small to deduce differences between the potentials for D$^+$ and D$^-$ mesons. However, for $\Xi\bar{\Xi}$ pairs produced at 2.9GeV/c the asymmetry is sufficiently sensitive to predicted differences between the $\Xi$ and $\bar{\Xi}$ potentials.