An enhancement of antiprotons produced in p+d reaction in comparison with ones in p+p elementary reaction is investigated. In the neighborhood of subthreshold energy the enhancement is caused by the difference of available energies for antiproton production. The cross section in p+d reaction, on the other hand, becomes just twice of the one in elementary p+p reaction at the incident energy far from the threshold energy when non-nucleonic components in deuteron target are not considered.
Inclusive and semi-inclusive measurements are presented for antiproton ($bar{p}$) production in proton-nucleus collisions at the AGS. The inclusive yields per event increase strongly with increasing beam energy and decrease slightly with increasing target mass. The $bar{p}$ yield in 17.5 GeV/c p+Au collisions decreases with grey track multiplicity, $N_g$, for $N_g>0$, consistent with annihilation within the target nucleus. The relationship between $N_g$ and the number of scatterings of the proton in the nucleus is used to estimate the $bar{p}$ annihilation cross section in the nuclear medium. The resulting cross section is at least a factor of five smaller than the free $bar{p}-p$ annihilation cross section when assuming a small or negligible formation time. Only with a long formation time can the data be described with the free $bar{p}-p$ annihilation cross section.
We calculate the subthreshold production of antiprotons in the Lorentz-covariant RBUU approach employing a weighted testparticle method to treat the antiproton propagation and absorption nonperturbatively. We find that the pbar differential cross sections are highly sensitive to the baryon and antiproton selfenergies in the dense baryonic environment. Adopting the baryon scalar and vector selfenergies from the empirical optical potential for proton-nucleus elastic scattering and from Dirac-Brueckner calculations at higher density rho > rho_0 we examine the differential pbar spectra as a function of the antiproton selfenergy. A detailed comparison with the available experimental data for p-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus reactions shows that the antiproton feels a moderately attractive mean-field at normal nuclear matter density rho_0 which is in line with a dispersive potential extracted from the free annihilation cross section.
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.
Production cross sections of K$^+$ and K$^-$ mesons have been measured in C+C collisions at beam energies per nucleon below and near the nucleon-nucleon threshold. At a given beam energy, the spectral slopes of the K$^-$ mesons are significantly steeper than the ones of the K$^+$ mesons. The excitation functions for K$^+$ and K$^-$ mesons nearly coincide when correcting for the threshold energy. In contrast, the K$^+$ yield exceeds the K$^-$ yield by a factor of about 100 in proton-proton collisions at beam energies near the respective nucleon-nucleon thresholds.
A model for the p d --> p d eta reaction published earlier, including the final state interaction (FSI) of all particles, is revisited to investigate the low energy data on this reaction. The three body problem of p-d-eta scattering in the final state is approximated in terms of pairwise interactions between the three particles in the final state. Apart from a comparison with some preliminary data, two new findings relevant to the near threshold data analysis are reported. The first one points toward the limitations of an FSI factor used conventionally to extract the eta-deuteron scattering length and infer subsequently on the existence of eta-mesic states. The second result emphasizes the role of the $p-d$ FSI and the strong Coulomb repulsion near threshold. Finally, a comparison of the above model calculation with low energy data, excludes very large eta-nucleon scattering lengths.