Possibilities of revealing collective pion degrees of freedomin nuclei by means of quasielastic pion knockout by high-energy electrons

Abstract

The kinematics of quasielastic pion knockout by longitudinal virtual photons in the electroproduction process is presented. The possibility of directly investigating pion momentum distributions in specific channels owing to pole-amplitude dominance is considered. It is shown that, taking into account the final-state interaction of the knock-on pion and the nucleus involved, one can reveal the existence of a pion condensate in nuclei, since the momentum distribution of collective pions has a pronounced maximum at a momentum in excess of 0.3 GeV/c and since the excitation spectrum of the final recoil nucleus is concentrated in the low-energy region E* {approx_equal} K{sup 2}/(2AM{sub N}) {<=} 1 MeV. The picture of pion knockout from meson clouds of individual nucleons is totally different. The analogous rho-meson momentum distributions for the process {rho} + {gamma}{sub T}* {yields} {pi} are also presented.