Search for the He-η bound states with the WASA-at-COSY facility

¹ M. Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
² Institut fur Kernphysik, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany

^a e-mail: mskurzok@gmail.com

Abstract

The η-mesic nuclei in which the η meson is bound with nucleus via strong interaction was postulated already in 1986, however till now no experiment confirmed empirically its existence. The discovery of this new kind of an exotic nuclear matter would be very important for better understanding of the η meson structure and its interaction with nucleons. The search for η-mesic helium is carried out with high statistic and high acceptance with the WASA-at-COSY detection setup in the Research Center Jülich. The search is conducted via the measurement of the excitation function for the chosen decay channels of the ⁴He-η system. Till now two reactions dd → (⁴He-η)_bs → ³Hepπ⁻ and dd → (⁴He-η)_bs → ³Henπ⁰ were measured with the beam momentum ramped around the η production threshold. This report includes the description of experimental method and status of the analysis.