No Arabic abstract
Due to their short life-time, flavour-neutral mesons cannot be utilized as free secondary beams or targets, and therefore a study of their interaction with nucleons is not possible via direct scattering experiments. This interaction is, however, accessible via its influence on the energy dependence - and on the phase space distributions of the cross sections for reactions in which these mesons are produced. In case of the p p --> p p eta reaction the experimentally determined distributions of the differential cross sections close to the production threshold cannot be described by taking into account the S-wave proton-proton and proton-eta interaction only. Here we show that the angular distributions determined at the COSY-11 facility reveal some evidence for P-wave admixture in the proton-proton subsystem already at an excess energy as low as Q = 15.5 MeV. We also present that one can estimate the relative strength of the eta-nucleon and eta-prime-nucleon interactions by comparison of the eta and eta-prime production yield.
A comparison of the close-to-threshold total cross sections for the eta-prime meson production in both the pp --> pp eta-prime and pn --> pn eta-prime reactions should provide insight into the flavour-singlet (perhaps also into gluonium) content of the eta-prime meson and the relevance of quark-gluon or hadronic degrees of freedom in the creation process. The excitation function for the reaction pp --> pp eta-prime has been already established. At present, experimental investigations of the quasi-free pn --> pn X reactions are carried out at the COSY-11 facility using a beam of stochastically cooled protons and the deuteron cluster target. A method of measurement and preliminary results from the test experiments of the pn --> pn eta reaction are presented in this report.
The COSY-11 collaboration has conducted experiments aiming at the determination of the excitation function and phase-space population of the p p --> p p eta reaction close to the kinematical threshold. The precise data obtained with the stochastically cooled proton beam of the cooler synchrotron COSY and the high resolution zero-degree magnetic spectrometer allowed for the observation of the significant deviations - in the shape of the excitation function and two-particle invariant masses - from the predictions based on the assumption that the reaction phase space is homogenously populated. Comparison of the shape of the excitation function for the p p --> p p eta and p p --> p p eta-prime reaction allows to distinquish in the model independent way an influence originating from the proton-proton and proton-eta interaction. For the comparison the full data set from experiments performed at COSY and other laboratories is used.
A study of the partial-wave content of the $gamma pto eta^prime p$ reaction in the fourth resonance region is presented, which has been prompted by new measurements of polarization observables for that process. Using the Bonn-Gatchina partial-wave formalism, the incorporation of new data indicates that the $N(1895)1/2^-$, $N(1900)3/2^+$, $N(2100)1/2^+$, and $N(2120)3/2^-$ are the most significant contributors to the photoproduction process. New results for the branching ratios of the decays of these more prominent resonances to $Neta^prime$ final states are provided; such branches have not been indicated in the most recent edition of the Review of Particle Properties. Based on the analysis performed here, predictions for the helicity asymmetry $E$ for the $gamma pto eta^prime p$ reaction are presented.
The hadronic decays eta, eta-prime -> 3 pi and eta-prime -> eta pi pi are investigated within the framework of U(3) chiral effective field theory in combination with a relativistic coupled-channels approach. Final state interactions are included by deriving s- and p-wave interaction kernels for meson-meson scattering from the chiral effective Lagrangian and iterating them in a Bethe-Salpeter equation. Very good overall agreement with currently available data on decay widths and spectral shapes is achieved.
We report on the status of the search for eta-mesic nuclei and the studies of the interaction of the eta meson with nucleons. Recently we have completed the analysis of the new WASA-at-COSY data on the production of the eta meson with polarized proton beam. New results on the analyzing power for the pp->ppeta reaction with more than an order of magnitude improved precision shed a new light on the production mechanism of the eta meson in nucleon-nucleon collisions. Also, the latest results of the search for eta-mesic nuclei are discussed.