Collisional deexcitation of exotic hydrogen atoms in highly excited states. II. Cascade calculations

The atomic cascades in mu-p and pbar-p atoms have been studied in detail using new results for the cross-sections of the scattering of highly excited exotic atoms from molecular hydrogen. The cascade calculations have been done with an updated version of the extended standard cascade model that computes the evolution in the kinetic energy from the beginning of the cascade. The resulting X-ray yields, kinetic energy distributions, and cascade times are compared with the experimental data.Comment: 13 pages, 23 figure

Collisional deexcitation of exotic hydrogen atoms in highly excited states. I. Cross-sections

The deexcitation of exotic hydrogen atoms in highly excited states in collisions with hydrogen molecules has been studied using the classical-trajectory Monte Carlo method. The Coulomb transitions with large change of principal quantum number n have been found to be the dominant collisional deexcitation mechanism at high n. The molecular structure of the hydrogen target is shown to be essential for the dominance of transitions with large \Delta n. The external Auger effect has been studied in the eikonal approximation. The resulting partial wave cross-sections are consistent with unitarity and provide a more reliable input for cascade calculations than the previously used Born approximation.Comment: 10 pages, 20 figure

Higher Order Two Step Mechanisms in Nucleon Antinucleon Annihilation and the OZI Rule

We evaluate three meson doorway mechanisms for nucleon-antinucleon annihilation at rest for the first time. Detailed results are presented for the final state phi pi0 originating from the 3S1 initial state and for the phi rho channel originating from 1S0. The results presented also include the improved contributions from two meson doorway states and from the tree diagrams. For all the channels considered a consistent explanation of large and small OZI violations emerges.Comment: 18 pages, 2 PostScript figures, will be published in Eur. Phys. J.

Mass and width of the sigma

I report on recent work done in collaboration with Irinel Caprini and Gilberto Colangelo. We observe that the Roy equations lead to a representation of the pion pion scattering amplitude that exclusively involves observable quantities, but is valid for complex values of s. At low energies, this representation is dominated by the contributions from the two subtraction constants, which are known to remarkable precision from the low energy theorems of chiral perturbation theory. Evaluating the remaining contributions on the basis of the available data, we demonstrate that the lowest resonance carries the quantum numbers of the vacuum and occurs in the vicinity of the threshold. Although the uncertainties in the data are substantial, the pole position can be calculated quite accurately, because it occurs in the region where the amplitude is dominated by the subtractions. The calculation neatly illustrates the fact that the dynamics of the Goldstone bosons is governed by the symmetries of QCD.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of MESON 2006 (Krakow

Scattering of light exotic atoms in excited states

The differential and total cross sections for the scattering of muonic, pionic, kaonic and antiprotonic hydrogen in excited states from atomic hydrogen have been calculated for the purpose of atomic cascade calculations. The scattering problem is treated in a fully quantum mechanical framework which takes the energy shifts and, in the case of the hadronic atoms, the widths of the ns states into account. The validity of semiclassical approximations is critically examined