Statistical production and binding energy of hypernuclei

Abstract

High-energy nuclear reactions enable us to produce a large variety of hypernuclei through the capture of hyperons by nuclear residues. We explore the statistical disintegration of such hypernuclear systems and the connection of fragment production to the binding energies of hyperons. It has been demonstrated that the hyperon binding energies can be effectively evaluated from the yields of different isotopes of hypernuclei by using the double ratio method. The advantages of this procedure are its universality and the possibility to involve many different isotopes. This method can also be applied for multistrange nuclei, for which binding energies were very difficult to measure in previous hypernuclear experiments. Corrections caused by secondary deexcitation processes are also discussed.