Unpolarized and polarized elementary kaon electroproduction cross sections measured at MAMI

¹ Institut für Kernphysik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany
² GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, Darmstadt, Germany
³ Department of Physics, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
⁴ Nuclear Physics Institute, Řež near Prague, Czech Republic
⁵ University of Ljubljana and Institut “Jožef Stefan”, Ljubljana, Slovenia
⁶ Department of Physics, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
⁷ Yerevan Physics Institute, Yerevan, Armenia
⁸ Helmholtz Institute Mainz, Mainz, Germany
⁹ Department of Physics, Florida International University, Miami, FL USA
¹⁰ Department of Physics, Hampton University, Hampton, VA USA

^a e-mail: patrick@kph.uni-mainz.de

Abstract

Present and future research into the electroproduction of kaons plays an important role at Mainz Microtron MAMI. With the Kaos spectrometer employed for kaon detection in the multi-spectrometer facility, cross section measurements of the exclusive p(e, e′K⁺)Λ, ∑⁰ reactions at low momentum transfers have been performed. Isobar and Regge-plus-resonance models were compared with the data. These measurements have clearly discriminated between effective Lagrangian models for photo- and electroproduction of strangeness. New experiments with polarized beam at low four-momentum transfer are addressing the imaginary part of the longitudinal-transverse response in this process, that can be separated by flipping the beam electron helicity. These studies are important for the understanding of basic coupling constants in the isobar models and the electromagnetic form factors of the hadrons and their resonances involved in the process.