Decay pion spectroscopy: a new approach

Abstract

We propose a new experiment for decay pion spectroscopy of light hypernuclei at electron- and proton-beam facilities, using the recoil distance technique for separation of produced hypernuclei and a magnetic spectrometer for precise measurement of the decay pion momentum. Low-pressure MWPCs are advocated for low-energy recoil detection as they provide position and time information and are highly insensitive to gamma-ray and electron background. The position and timing characteristics of such a recoil detector were studied using ~5 MeV α-particles. By using the present proposed approach the rate of the detected hypernuclei can be increased by one-to-two orders of magnitude compared to a recent experiment carried out at the MAMI electron accelerator in Mainz. The possibility of realizing a high luminosity decay pion spectroscopy experiment with proton beams is also discussed.

29 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Observation of Lambda H-4 hyperhydrogen by decay-pion spectroscopy in electron scattering
• Charge symmetry breaking in $\Lambda$ hypernuclei revisited
• Production of excited double hypernuclei via Fermi breakup of excited strange systems
• Analysis of the consistency of kaon photoproduction data with Lambda in the final state
• High Precision Momentum Calibration of the Magnetic Spectrometers at MAMI for Hypernuclear Binding Energy Determination