Study of the ground and excited states of Lambda and Sigma hyperon production at COSY

Abstract

COSY with a maximum beam momentum of ~3.65 GeV/c allows the production of ground state (Lambda and Sigma) and excited hyperons (Lambda(1405), Sigma(1385) and Lambda(1520)) in elementary NN interactions. The existing data base in this field is rather poor. A systematic study of the hyperon production at COSY will result in an improvement of our understanding concerning topics like hyperon-nucleon interaction, kaon-nucleon interaction, nucleon resonances, strangeness production mechanism and structure of the Lambda(1405). Precise data on Lambda and Sigma production have been produced at the COSY-11 and TOF installation. With the WASA detector at COSY these studies can be continued and extended to channels including photons in the final state.

Talk given at 2nd Symposium on Threshold Meson Production and p p and p d Interactions (Extended COSY-11 Collaboration Meeting), Cracow, Poland, 31 May - 3 Jun 2004. Published in Schriften des FZ-Juelich: Matter & Material 21 (2004) 30