Meson-nucleus potentials and the search for meson-nucleus bound states

Understand

Recent experiments studying the meson-nucleus interaction to extract meson-nucleus potentials are reviewed.

• The real part of the potentials quantifies whether the interaction is attractive or repulsive while the imaginary part describes the meson absorption in nuclei.
• The review is focused on mesons which are sufficiently long-lived to potentially form meson-nucleus quasi-bound states.
• The presentation is confined to meson production off nuclei in photon-, pion-, proton-, and light-ion induced reactions and heavy-ion collisions at energies near the production threshold.