Ken'ichi Imai

Professor, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University

 

 

Flavored nuclei and nuclear force are a frontier of nuclear physics. In spite of the success of Yukawa's meson theory to explain the nuclear force in the first place, we still can not calculate the nuclear force and nuclei from the basic principle of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD). To obtain deeper understandings of nuclei and the nuclear force, we have been studying "exotic nuclei" and "exotic nuclear force". Ordinary nuclei consist of nucleons, protons and neutrons, and are bound by the nuclear force, interaction between nucleons. By using K, π and other beams from high energy accelerators, we can change nucleons in nuclei into hyperons which have different flavor from nucleons, and can produce flavored nuclei. We have studied such flavored nuclei with novel experimental techniques and have found various unexpected results which provided us new information on nuclear matter and the nuclear force, and also on neutron stars.
However, many experiments are limited by the beam intensity of the existing accelerators and we still have open questions on nuclei and QCD, such as a possible existence of flavored quark matter, pentaquark, dibaryon and quark stars. We discuss the perspectives of the accelerator project, J-PARC, in Japan which will play a major role to explore this frontier of nuclear physics.

 

 

 

 

 

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