Investigation of kaonic atom optical potential by the high precision data of kaonic $^3$He and $^4$He atoms

TL;DR

This paper analyzes high-precision data of kaonic helium atoms to determine optical potential parameters, exploring their implications for kaonic atom and nucleus structures, and highlighting the importance of the 1s states for future research.

Contribution

It provides a phenomenological optical potential model fitted to recent data, revealing isospin dependence and guiding future studies of kaonic atomic and nuclear states.

Findings

Two sets of potential parameters reproduce the data.

Potential parameters suggest strong isospin dependence.

Study of 1s states offers insights into atomic and nuclear kaon states.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate kaonic atom states based on the latest high precision data of the $2p$ states of the kaonic atoms in $^3$He and $^4$He (J-PARC E62). We consider the phenomenological form for the optical potential proportional to the nuclear density distributions and determine the potential parameters by the latest data. We find two sets of potential parameters for each of $K^--^3$He and $K^--^4$He that reproduce the data. We then extract the potential parameters consistent with the data of $^3$He and $^4$He atoms simultaneously. Using the potential, we investigate the structure of the kaonic atoms and kaonic nuclei for various nuclei up to Sn. We also report the optical potential parameters suited for the global description of the atomic data, the possible strong isospin dependence of the potential, and the different strength of the data of $K^--^3$He and $K^--^4$He in the restrictions on the potential parameters. In addition, we find that the study of the $1s$ states of the kaonic helium atom is very interesting as a next step, and the determination of the orbital angular momenta of the kaonic nuclear states is helpful for the unified understandings of the atomic and nuclear bound states of kaon because of the mutual influence between the atomic and the nuclear states of kaon with the same orbital angular momentum.