Kaon-nucleon scattering lengths from kaonic deuterium experiments

Abstract

The extraction of the S-wave kaon-nucleon scattering lengths a0 and a1 from a combined analysis of existing kaonic hydrogen and synthetic deuterium data has been carried out within the framework of a low-energy effective field theory. It turns out that with the present DEAR central values for the kaonic hydrogen ground-state energy and width, a solution for a0 and a1 exists only in a restricted domain of input values for the kaon-deuteron scattering length. Consequently, measuring this scattering length imposes stringent constraints on the theoretical description of the kaon-deuteron interactions at low energies.

9 pages, 2 postscript figures