Strangeness and charm in nuclear matter

The properties of strange (K, image and image) and open-charm (D, image and image) mesons in dense matter are studied using a unitary approach in coupled channels for meson–baryon scattering. In the strangeness sector, the interaction with nucleons always comes through vector-meson exchange, which is evaluated by chiral and hidden gauge Lagrangians. For the interaction of charmed mesons with nucleons we extend the SU(3) Weinberg–Tomozawa Lagrangian to incorporate spin–flavor symmetry and implement a suitable flavor symmetry breaking. The in-medium solution for the scattering amplitude accounts for Pauli blocking effects and meson self-energies. On one hand, we obtain the K, image and image spectral functions in the nuclear medium and study their behaviour at finite density, temperature and momentum. We also make an estimate of the transparency ratio of the image reaction, which we propose as a tool to detect in-medium modifications of the image meson. On the other hand, in the charm sector, several resonances with negative parity are generated dynamically by the s-wave interaction between pseudoscalar and vector meson multiplets with image and image baryons. The properties of these states in matter are analyzed and their influence on the open-charm meson spectral functions is studied. We finally discuss the possible formation of D-mesic nuclei at FAIR energies.