Eur. Phys. J. A (2005) 23: 491-499
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2004-10094-8

Analysis of Θproduction in K⁺- Xe collisions

¹ Institut für Kernphysik (Theorie), Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425, Jülich, Germany
² Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik (Theorie), Universität Bonn, Nußallee 14-16, D-53115, Bonn, Germany

Received: 8 July 2004
Accepted: 3 November 2004
Published online: 17 January 2005

Abstract

The reaction K ⁺Xe↦K ⁰ pX is investigated in a meson-exchange model including rescattering of the secondary protons with the aim to analyze the evidence for the Θ⁺(1540)-resonance reported by the DIANA Collaboration. We confirm that the kinematical cuts introduced by the DIANA Collaboration efficiently suppress the background to the K ⁺ n↦K ⁰ p reaction which may contribute to the Θ⁺(1540) production. We find that these kinematical cuts do not produce a narrow structure in the K^0p effective-mass spectra near 1540 MeV. We study the effect of a narrow Θ⁺-resonance of both positive and negative parity in comparison with the DIANA data. We show that the K ⁺Xe↦K ⁰ pX calculations without Θ⁺ contribution as well as the results obtained with a Θ⁺ width of 1 MeV are in comparably good agreement with the DIANA results. More dedicated experiments are called for to establish this exotic baryon resonance.