Evidence of kaon nuclear and Coulomb potential effects on soft K+ production from nuclei

Abstract

The ratio of forward K+ production on copper, silver and gold targets to that on carbon has been measured at proton beam energies between 1.5 and 2.3 GeV as a function of the kaon momentum p_K using the ANKE spectrometer at COSY-Juelich. The strong suppression in the ratios observed for p_K<200-250 MeV/c can be ascribed to a combination of Coulomb and nuclear repulsion in the K+A system. This opens a new way to investigate the interaction of K+-mesons in the nuclear medium. Our data are consistent with a K+A nuclear potential of V_K~20 MeV at low kaon momenta and normal nuclear density. Given the sensitivity of the data to the kaon potential, the current experimental precision might allow one to determine V_K to better than 3 MeV.

9 pages, 3 figures; changed content

References in corpus (4)

• Production of Charged Pions, Kaons and Antikaons in Relativistic C+C and C+Au Collisions
• Inclusive Soft Pion Production from 12.3 and 17.5 GeV/c Protons on Be, Cu and Au
• Forward K+ production in subthreshold pA collisions at 1.0 GeV
• Phenomenological analysis of K+ meson production in proton-nucleus collisions

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