Deeply bound levels in kaonic atoms Original Research Article

Using a microscopic antikaon–nucleus optical potential recently developed by Ramos and Oset [? ] from a chiral model, we calculate strong interaction energy shifts and widths for K− atoms. This purely theoretical potential gives an acceptable description of the measured data (View the MathML source), though it turns out to be less attractive than what can be inferred from the existing kaon atomic data. We also use a modified potential, obtained by adding to the latter theoretical one a s-wave term which is fitted to known experimental kaonic data (View the MathML source), to predict deeply bound K− atomic levels, not yet detected. This improved potential predicts, in general, states even narrower than those recently reported by Friedman and Gal [? ]. This reinforces the idea that these deeply atomic states can be detected and resolved by using suitable nuclear reactions. Besides, we also study K− and View the MathML source nuclear bound states and compute binding energies and widths, for both species of antikaons, in 12C, 40Ca and 208Pb. Despite of restricting our study only to potentials obtained from best fits to the known kaonic atom data, the dynamics of these nuclear bound states depends dramatically on the particular optical potential used.