Production of hypernuclei from antiproton capture within a relativistic transport model

Abstract

Production yields of single-$$\Lambda $$ Λ hypernuclei from simulated peripheral annihilations of antiprotons after capture on various target nuclei are reported. The initial annihilation process and the production of excited hypernuclei are estimated within the GiBUU transport framework, while their deexcitation process is treated with the ABLA++ code. The yield of excited hypernuclei range from $$\sim $$ ∼ 0.3 % for $${}^{16}$$ 16 O to $$\sim $$ ∼ 1.2 % for $${}^{132}$$ 132 Xe per annihilation, consistent with previous measurements at LEAR, CERN. The yield of specific ground state hypernuclei after deexcitation reaches up to a few $$10^{-4}$$ 10 - 4 per annihilation. The hypernuclei are produced in strangeness exchange reactions occuring between a nucleon of the target and the kaons originating from the annihilation in $$\sim $$ ∼ 80 % of the cases, while the strangeness pair production in secondary pion-nucleon collision contributes to the remaining $$\sim $$ ∼ 20 %. The simulations indicate that antiproton annihilations at rest on different nuclei could populate a wide range of so-far unexplored hypernuclei.