Hyperon Physics with PANDA at FAIR

Abstract

Hyperons provide new angles on two of the most challenging problems in contemporary physics: a coherent and quantitative description of the strong interaction, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. The production dynamics and the electromagnetic structure of strange hyperons, as well as hyperon spectroscopy, give insights into the strong interaction in the confinement domain. Furthermore, two-body decays of strange hyperons provide clean tests of CP symmetry, an essential piece to the matter-antimatter puzzle. The future experiment PANDA at FAIR offers unique possibilities to study different aspects of hyperons using antiproton beams. In particular, the hitherto almost unexplored multi-strange sector will be addressed. The expected large production cross sections of hyperons and the versatile, near 4πdetector design makes PANDA a veritable hyperon factory already from the first phase of operation. In these proceedings, the opportunities for hyperon physics with PANDA will be outlined. I will also address how we can benefit from the weak hyperon decays, that provide straight-forward access to the full spin density matrix.