THE KAONIC ATOMS 'PUZZLE': WHAT NEXT?

Abstract

The 'kaonic atoms puzzle' is a conflict between phenomenological potentials and potentials constructed from more fundamental approaches. Whereas the former are typically 180 MeV deep, the latter are less than 50 MeV deep. Extrapolating to neutron star densities only the former could sustain kaon condensation. Likewise only the deep potential could support the recently proposed clusters of nucleons strongly bound by an antikaon. Careful re-analyses of the world's data on kaonic atoms could not suggest an explanation to the puzzle. Repeating some of the 30-40 years old experiments seems the only way to proceed. We propose to repeat measurements for a small group of kaonic atom species, namely C , Si , Ni , Sn and Pb . It is found that fits to the data for any four of these five targets reproduce all the features obsereved in fits to the full set of 23 targets.