Production of hypernuclei by the (γ, K) reaction

Abstract

Photo- and electro-production of kaons on nuclei are discussed as means for reaching a wide variety of hypernuclear states, including both lambda and sigma hypernuclei. The estimated cross sections are seen to be very promising, with counting rates under typical conditions of order few × 10 2/hr/MeV. The great advantage of the (γ, K) reaction is that the kaon does not interact very strongly with the nucleons in the final state and so one has an excellent mechanism for studying nuclear-hypernuclear structure. Indeed these distortions appear to be sufficiently weak that such information can be obtained throughout the whole periodic table for a wide variety of hyperon shells (and not just substitutional valence shell occupations). The present results appear to indicate a bright future for strangeness-changing photonuclear physics.