ALPHA DECAYS OF L10 Be AND L10B HYPERNUCLEI ON THE NUCLOTRON: A CLUE TO SOME PUZZLES IN NONLEPTONIC PROCESSES

Batusov Yu. A., Lukstins J., Majling L., Parfenov A. N.

Hypernuclei are a convenient laboratory to study the baryon-baryon weak interaction and associated effective weak Hamiltonian. The strangeness changing process, in which a L hyperon in nuclear matter converts to a neutron with a release of up to 176 MeV, provides a clear signal for a conversion of an s quark to a d quark. It is shown how the nuclear structure aspects of the problem, often an unwelcome detail of calculations attempting to understand a basic two-body LN sh NN interaction, can be used to pick out components of the effective weak Hamiltonian. It is well known that removing one neutron from 9Be results in 8Be* with a subsequent aa decay. Through this process it would be possible to identify final states of the residual nucleus. So, due to this salient feature of the core nuclei 9Be and 9B, it may be possible to measure the branching fractions Gn(p)aai for the exclusive decays of the L10 Be and L10B hypernuclei. These branching fractions Gn(p)aai depend on various combinations of four matrix elements, hence their study offers a unique possibility of determining all needed matrix elements of the weak interaction and in such a way localizing the difficulties of the hypernuclear nonmesonic decay puzzle. Recently the Nuclotron accelerator at JINR (Dubna) has supplied the first extracted beam of medium-energy ions. This opens new opportunities of performing hypernuclear experiments. With the new trigger tuned to search for two a-particles, the branching fractions Gnaai (L10 Be) and Gpaai (L10 B) will be measured.

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