Study of doubly strange systems using stored antiprotons

Bound nuclear systems with two units of strangeness are still poorly known despite their importance for many strong interaction phenomena. Stored antiprotons beams in the GeV range represent an unparalleled factory for various hyperon-antihyperon pairs. Their outstanding large production probability in antiproton collisions will open the floodgates for a series of new studies of systems which contain two or even more units of strangeness at the P‾ANDA experiment at FAIR. For the first time, high resolution γ-spectroscopy of doubly strange ΛΛ-hypernuclei will be performed, thus complementing measurements of ground state decays of ΛΛ-hypernuclei at J-PARC or possible decays of particle unstable hypernuclei in heavy ion reactions. High resolution spectroscopy of multistrange Ξ−-atoms will be feasible and even the production of Ω−-atoms will be within reach. The latter might open the door to the |S|=3 world in strangeness nuclear physics, by the study of the hadronic Ω−-nucleus interaction. For the first time it will be possible to study the behavior of Ξ‾+ in nuclear systems under well controlled conditions

The origin and abundances of the chemical elements revisited

The basic scheme of nucleosynthesis (building of heavy elements from light ones) has held up very well since it was first proposed more than 30 years ago by E.M. Burbidge, G.R. Burbidge, A.G.W. Cameron, W.A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle. Significant advances in the intervening years include (a) observations of elemental and a few isotopic ratios in many more extrasolar-system sites, including metal-poor dwarf irregular galaxies, where very little has happened, and supernovae and their remnants, where a great deal has happened, (b) recognition of the early universe as good for making all the elements up to helium, (c) resolution of heavy element burning in stars into separate carbon, neon, oxygen, and silicon burning, with fine tuning of the resulting abundances by explosive nucleosynthesis in outgoing supernova shock waves, (d) clarification of the role of Type I supernovae, (e) concordance between elements produced in short-lived and long-lived stars with those that increased quickly and slowly over the history of the galaxy, and (f) calibration of calculations of the evolution and explosion of massive stars against the detailed observations of SN 1987A. The discussion presupposes a reader (a) with some prior knowledge of astronomy at the level of recognizing what is meant by an A star and an AGB star and (b) with at least a mild interest in how we got to where we currently are. © 1991 Springer-Verlag

Eperimental access to Transition Distribution Amplitudes with the PANDA experiment at FAIR

We address the possibility of accessing nucleon-to-pion (πN) Transition Distribution Amplitudes (TDAs) from p¯p→e+e−π0 reaction with the future \={P}ANDA detector at the FAIR facility. At high center of mass energy and high invariant mass of the lepton pair q2, the amplitude of the signal channel p¯p→e+e−π0 admits a QCD factorized description in terms of πN TDAs and nucleon Distribution Amplitudes (DAs) in the forward and backward kinematic regimes. Assuming the validity of this factorized description, we perform feasibility studies for measuring p¯p→e+e−π0 with the \={P}ANDA detector. Detailed simulations on signal reconstruction efficiency as well as on rejection of the most severe background channel, {\it i.e.} p¯p→π+π−π0 were performed for the center of mass energy squared s=5 GeV2 and s=10 GeV2, in the kinematic regions 3.00.5 in the proton-antiproton center of mass frame. Results of the simulation show that the particle identification capabilities of the \={P}ANDA detector will allow to achieve a background rejection factor at the level of 108 (2⋅107) at low (high) q2 while keeping the signal reconstruction efficiency at around 40% and that a clean lepton signal can be reconstructed with the expected statistics corresponding to 2 fb−1 of integrated luminosity. The future measurement of the signal channel cross section with \={P}ANDA will provide a new test of perturbative QCD description of a novel class of hard exclusive reactions and will open the possibility of experimentally accessing πN TDAs