Tribute to Toshimitsu Yamazaki (1934-2025): Quest for Exotic Hadronic Matter
Avraham Gal

TL;DR
This paper honors Toshimitsu Yamazaki's pioneering work in hadronic physics, especially in strangeness nuclear physics, highlighting discoveries of pionic-atom states and kaonic nuclei, and discusses recent work on the H dibaryon.
Contribution
It reviews Yamazaki's key contributions and presents recent findings on the H dibaryon, suggesting it is unlikely to be a dark matter candidate due to its short lifetime.
Findings
Discovery of deeply bound pionic-atom states
Search for kaonic nuclei and kaonic proton matter
Deeply bound H dibaryon unlikely as dark matter
Abstract
In this talk I pay tribute to Toshimitsu Yamazaki who died earlier this year. Yamazaki's leading contributions to Hadronic Physics, in particular to Strangeness Nuclear Physics in Japan and elsewhere, are well known. Two of the five Recurring Themes of his research, as listed in the Japan Academy site, are highlighted here: (i) Discovery of deeply bound pionic-atom states, and (ii) Search for kaonic nuclei -- Kaonic Proton Matter (KPM). I conclude by reviewing briefly my own recent work, confirming Farrar's conjecture that a deeply bound dibaryon is not ruled out by the weak-decay observation of hypernuclei. However, the relatively long lifetime of such a deeply bound is much too short to qualify it for a Dark-Matter candidate.
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