Strange Bound States
Prof. Dr. Laura Fabbietti (Excellence Cluster Universe, Garching)

The kaon-nucleon and kaon-nucleus interaction is the main focus of the research program of my group at the Excellence Cluster Universe in Munich. Why to look for something like that? Historically people have asked themselves whether a kaon condensate can appear inside neutron stars, due to the strong attractive potential between antikaons and nucleons.
On the other hand we ask ourselves if this antikaon-nucleon interaction is so strong to form new bound states, composed of one antikaons and two or more nucleons.
As far as kaons K+ and K0s are concerned, the kaon-nucleus interaction is predicted found to be repulsive. In order to prove or disprove these hypotheses the kaon-nucleon/nucleus potential should be determined. Experimentally, we approach these issues studying the kaons properties and the formation of particular strange baryons in p+p, p+Nb and heavy ion collisions at beam energies varying between 1.7 and 3.5 GeV at GSI and we plan future experiments exploiting pion beams.
An overview of our activities and so far achieved results will be given during this talk.