A novel method is proposed to measure eta(958) meson bound states in 11C nuclei by missing mass spectroscopy of the 12C(p,d) reaction near the eta production threshold. It is shown that peak structures will be observed experimentally in an inclusive measurement in case that the in-medium eta mass reduction is sufficiently large and that the decay width of eta mesic states is narrow enough. Such a measurement will be feasible with the intense proton beam supplied by the SIS synchrotron at GSI combined with the good energy resolution of the fragment separator FRS.
We are going to perform an inclusive spectroscopy experiment of eta mesic nuclei with the 12C(p,d) reaction to study in-medium properties of the eta meson. In nuclear medium, the eta meson mass may be reduced due to partial restoration of chiral symmetry. In case of sufficiently large mass reduction and small absorption width of eta at normal nuclear density, peak structures of eta mesic states in 11C will be observed near the eta emission threshold even in an inclusive spectrum. The experiment will be carried out at GSI with proton beam supplied by SIS using FRS as a spectrometer. The detail of the experiment is described.
We calculate theoretically the formation spectra of eta(958)-nucleus systems in the (p,d) reaction for the investigation of the in-medium modification of the eta mass. We show the comprehensive numerical calculations based on a simple form of the eta optical potential in nuclei with various potential depths. We conclude that one finds an evidence of possible attractive interaction between eta and nucleus as peak structure appearing around the eta threshold in light nuclei such as 11C when the attractive potential is stronger than 100 MeV and the absorption width is of order of 40 MeV or less. Spectroscopy of the (p,d) reaction is expected to be performed experimentally at existing facilities, such as GSI. We also estimate the contributions from the omega and phi mesons, which have masses close to the eta meson, concluding that the observation of the peak structure of the eta-mesic nuclei is not disturbed although their contributions may not be small.
The total cross section of the p d -> p d eta reaction has been measured at two energies near threshold by detecting the final proton and deuteron in a magneti spectrometer. The values are somewhat larger than expected on the basis of two simple theoretical estimates.
There is much speculation and a modest amount of evidence that certain mesons might form quasi-bound states with nuclei to produce really exotic states of matter. For this to be a practical possibility, the interaction between the meson and nucleons at low energies must be strong and attractive and the production rates healthy. The conditions for this are surveyed for the light mesons. How this might lead to quasi-bound states is then discussed in a few typical cases.
The mass of the {eta} meson is theoretically expected to be reduced at finite density, which indicates the existence of {eta}-nucleus bound states. To investigate these states, we perform missing-mass spectroscopy for the (p, d) reaction near the {eta} production threshold. The overview of the experimental situation is given and the current status is discussed.