Measurement of the Strong Interaction Induced Shift and Width of the 1s State of Kaonic Deuterium at J-PARC

Abstract

The antikaon-nucleon (K?N) interaction close to threshold provides crucial information on the interplay between spontaneous and explicit chiral symmetry breaking in low-energy QCD. In this context, the importance of kaonic deuterium X-ray spectroscopy has been well recognized, but no experimental results have yet been obtained due to the difficulty of the measurement. We propose to measure the shift and width of the kaonic deuterium 1s state with an accuracy of 60 eV and 140 eV, respectively, at J-PARC. These results, together with the kaonic hydrogen data (KpX at KEK, DEAR and SIDDHARTA at DAΦNE), will then permit the determination of values of both the isospin I = 0 and I = 1 antikaon-nucleon scattering lengths and will provide the most stringent constraints on the antikaon-nucleon interaction, promising a breakthrough. Refined Monte Carlo studies were performed, including the investigation of background suppression factors for the described setup. These studies have demonstrated the feasibility of determining the shift and width of the kaonic deuterium atom 1s state with the desired accuracy of 60 eV and 140 eV.