Anti-strange meson-baryon interaction in hot and dense nuclear matter

Understand

We present a study of in-medium cross sections and (off-shell) transition rates for the most relevant binary reactions for strange pseudoscalar meson production close to threshold in heavy-ion collisions at FAIR energies.

• Our results rely on a chiral unitary approach in coupled channels which incorporates the $s$- and $p$-waves of the kaon-nucleon interaction.
• The formalism, which is modified in the hot and dense medium to account for Pauli blocking effects, mean-field binding on baryons, and pion and kaon self-energies, has been improved to implement full unitarization and self-consistency for both the $s$- and $p$-wave interactions at finite temperature and density.
• This gives access to in-medium amplitudes in several elastic and inelastic coupled channels with strangeness content $S=-1$.