A critical view on the deeply bound K^- pp system

We briefly review the situation around the claimed deeply bound K^- states in different recent experiments and concentrate particularly on the state K^- pp advocated by the FINUDA collaboration in nuclear K^- absorption. We perform a theoretical simulation of the process and show that the peak in the Lambda p spectrum that was interpreted as a deep K^- pp bound state corresponds mostly to the process K^- p p --> Lambda p followed by final state interactions of the produced particles with the daughter nucleus.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figure

Strange meson-nucleon states in the quark potential model

The quark potential model and resonating group method are used to investigate the $\bar{K}N$ bound states and/or resonances. The model potential consists of the t-channel and s-channel one-gluon exchange potentials and the confining potential with incorporating the QCD renormalization correction and the spin-orbital suppression effect in it. It was shown in our previous work that by considering the color octet contribution, use of this model to investigate the $KN$ low energy elastic scattering leads to the results which are in pretty good agreement with the experimental data. In this paper, the same model and method are employed to calculate the masses of the $\bar{K}N$ bound systems. For this purpose, the resonating group equation is transformed into a standard Schr\"odinger equation in which a nonlocal effective $\bar{K}N$ interaction potential is included. Solving the Schr\"odinger equation by the variational method, we are able to reproduce the masses of some currently concerned $\bar{K}N$ states and get a view that these states possibly exist as $\bar{K}N$ molecular states. For the $KN$ system, the same calculation gives no support to the existence of the resonance $\Theta ^{+}(1540)$ which was announced recently.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Conventional view versus FINUDA claims of a deeply bound K

We critically revise the recent claims of a deeply bound K-pp state associated to a peak seen in the Λp invariant-mass spectrum following nuclear K- absorption reactions measured by the FINUDA Collaboration. An explicit theoretical simulation shows that the peak is simply generated from a two-nucleon absorption process, like K - pp→Λp, followed by final-state interactions of the produced particles with the residual nucleus