Inclusive e$^+$e$^-$ production has been studied with HADES in $\pi^-$ + p, $\pi^-$ + C and $\pi^- + \mathrm{CH}_2$ reactions, using the GSI pion beam at $\sqrt{s_{\pi p}}$ = 1.49 GeV. Invariant mass and transverse momentum distributions have been measured and reveal contributions from Dalitz decays of $\pi^0$, $\eta$ mesons and baryon resonances. The transverse momentum distributions are very sensitive to the underlying kinematics of the various processes. The baryon contribution exhibits a deviation up to a factor seven from the QED reference expected for the dielectron decay of a hypothetical point-like baryon with the production cross section constrained from the inverse $\gamma$ n$\rightarrow \pi^-$ p reaction. The enhancement is attributed to a strong four-momentum squared dependence of the time-like electromagnetic transition form factors as suggested by Vector Meson Dominance (VMD). Two versions of the VMD, that differ in the photon-baryon coupling, have been applied in simulations and compared to data. VMD1 (or two-component VMD) assumes a coupling via the $\rho$ meson and a direct coupling of the photon, while in VMD2 (or strict VMD) the coupling is only mediated via the $\rho$ meson. The VMD2 model, frequently used in transport calculations for dilepton decays, is found to overestimate the measured dielectron yields, while a good description of the data can be obtained with the VMD1 model assuming no phase difference between the two amplitudes. Similar descriptions have also been obtained using a time-like baryon transition form factor model where the pion cloud plays the major role.

The HIBEAM-NNBAR program is a proposed two-stage experiment at the European Spallation Source focusing on searches for baryon number violation processes as well as ultralight dark matter. This paper presents recent advancements in computing and simulation, including machine learning for event selection, fast parametric simulations for detector studies, and detailed modeling of the time projection chamber and readout electronics.

Hadron production ( π ^± , proton, Λ , K_S^0 , K^± ) in π ^- + C and π ^- + W collisions is investigated at an incident pion beam momentum of 1.7 GeV/c . This comprehensive set of data measured with HADES at SIS18/GSI significantly extends the existing world data on hadron production in pion induced reactions and provides a new reference for models that are commonly used for the interpretation of heavy-ion collisions. The measured inclusive differential production cross-sections are compared with state-of-the-art transport model (GiBUU, SMASH) calculations. The (semi-) exclusive channel π ^- + A →Λ + K_S^0 +X , in which the kinematics of the strange hadrons are correlated, is also investigated and compared to a model calculation. Agreement and remaining tensions between data and the current version of the considered transport models are discussed.

High-precision measurements of flow coefficients v_n ( n = 1 - 4 ) for protons, deuterons and tritons relative to the first-order spectator plane have been performed in Au+Au collisions at √(s__NN)= 2.4 GeV with the High-Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer (HADES) at the SIS18/GSI. Flow coefficients are studied as a function of transverse momentum p_t and rapidity y_cm over a large region of phase-space and for several classes of collision centrality. A clear mass hierarchy, as expected by relativistic hydrodynamics, is found for the slope of v_1 , d v_1/d y^'|_y^' = 0 where y^' is the scaled rapidity, and for v_2 at mid-rapidity. Scaling with the number of nucleons is observed for the p_t dependence of v_2 and v_4 at mid-rapidity, which is indicative for nuclear coalescence as the main process responsible for light nuclei formation. v_2 is found to scale with the initial eccentricity ⟨ϵ _2⟩ , while v_4 scales with ⟨ϵ _2⟩ ^2 and ⟨ϵ _4⟩ . The multi-differential high-precision data on v_1 , v_2 , v_3 , and v_4 provides important constraints on the equation-of-state of compressed baryonic matter.

Applying a Mott polarimetry for measurement of the transverse polarization components of electrons from free neutron decay as well as proton momentum reconstruction using the combination of the time of flight method and the kinematical constrains of this three body decay, one gets access to eleven correlation coefficients of the neutron β -decay. Successful measurement of some of these coefficients would allow for an unique access to exotic scalar and tensor couplings of weak interactions and obtaining new constraints on their imaginary part, known with much worse accuracy. Results of the performance studies of some key experimental components of the prototype setup performed during the test run in 2021 at ILL PF1B neutron beam line are presented.

The BRAND experiment aims at the search of Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics via measurement of exotic components of the weak interaction. For this purpose, eleven correlation coefficients of neutron β-decay will be measured simultaneously. The BRAND detection system is oriented for the registration of charged products of β-decay of polarized, free neutrons. With the measurement of the four-momenta of electron and proton, the complete kinematic of the decay will be determined. Moreover, the transverse spin component of the electron, which is the crucial observable to probe BSM exotic components of weak interaction, will be measured via Mott scattering. The electron detection system features both tracking and energy measurement capability. It is also responsible for the determination of the electron spin orientation. A challenging detection of low-energy protons from the β-decay is performed with a system, which involves the acceleration and subsequent conversion of protons into bunches of electrons. To test the feasibility of the proposed experimental techniques, a small-scale prototype setup was installed at the cold neutron beam facility PF1B at the Laue-Langevin Institute (ILL) in Grenoble, France. In this contribution, the preliminary results of the commissioning run are presented with an emphasis on the performance of individual parts of the detection system.

The double differential production cross sections, $d^2σ/dΩdE$, for hydrogen isotopes and charged pions in the reaction of p + Nb at 3.5 GeV proton beam energy have been measured by the High Acceptance DiElectron Spectrometer (HADES). Thanks to the high acceptance of HADES at forward emission angles and usage of its magnetic field, the measured energy range of hydrogen isotopes could be significantly extended in comparison to the relatively scarce experimental data available in the literature. The data provide information about the development of the intranuclear cascade in the proton-nucleus collisions. They can as well be utilized to study the rate of energy/momentum dissipation in the nuclear systems and the mechanism of elementary and composite particle production in excited nuclear matter at normal density. Data of this type are important also for technological and medical applications. Our results are compared to models developed to describe the processes relevant to nuclear spallation (INCL++) or oriented to probe either the elementary hadronic processes in nuclear matter or the behavior of compressed nuclear matter (GiBUU).

We discuss new experimental results on the mechanisms of light nuclei production, fluctuations of conserved charges and the emissivity of matter, studied with HADES at SIS18. The multi-differential representations of hadron and dilepton spectra, collective effects and particle correlations are confronted with hitherto model calculations.

In nuclear collisions the incident protons generate a Coulomb field which acts on produced charged particles. The impact of these interactions on charged-pion transverse-mass and rapidity spectra, as well as on pion–pion momentum correlations is investigated in Au + Au collisions at $$\sqrt{s_\text {NN}}$$ = 2.4 GeV. We show that the low- $$m_t$$ region ( $$m_t < 0.2$$   GeV/ $$c^2$$ ) can be well described with a Coulomb-modified Boltzmann distribution that also takes changes of the Coulomb field during the expansion of the fireball into account. The observed centrality dependence of the fitted mean Coulomb potential energy deviates strongly from a $$A_{\text {part}}^{2/3}$$ scaling, indicating that, next to the fireball, the non-interacting charged spectators have to be taken into account. For the most central collisions, the Coulomb modifications of the HBT source radii are found to be consistent with the potential extracted from the single-pion transverse-mass distributions. This finding suggests that the region of homogeneity obtained from two-pion correlations coincides with the region in which the pions freeze-out. Using the inferred mean-square radius of the charge distribution at freeze-out, we have deduced a baryon density, in fair agreement with values obtained from statistical hadronization model fits to the particle yields.

The BRAND experiment aims at the search of Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics via measurement of exotic components of weak interaction. For this purpose the eleven correlation coefficients of the neutron beta decay will be measured simultaneously. Seven of them: H, L, N, R, S, U and V, are sensitive to the transverse polarization of electrons from free neutron decay. The correlation coefficients will be derived using Mott polarimetry and completely determined kinematics of products from the polarized neutron beta decay. For this aim the beam of cold polarized neutrons available at the PF1B facility of the ILL, Grenoble will be utilized. The electron detection system features both the tracking and energy measurement capability as well as the Mott polarimetry for determination of the electron spin orientation. The 3D tracking is performed with the use of low density, helium based drift chamber with hexagonal cell structure which is optimised for beta-particles. The Mott polarimeter is an integral part of the tracker. It consists of a thin Pb foil installed inside the drift chamber and two plastic scitillators, providing trigger and scattered electron energy measurement. The results of the first pilot run of the BRAND experiment performed in September'20 are reported with the emphasis on the description and the performance of the electron detection system and the Mott polarimeter.

Neutron and nuclear beta decay correlation coefficients are sensitive to the exotic scalar and tensor interactions that are not included in the Standard Model (SM). The proposed experiment BRAND will measure simultaneously seven neutron correlation coefficients:H,L,N,R,S,UandVthat depend on the transverse electron polarization – a quantity which vanishes in the SM. Five of these correlations:H,L,S,UandVwere never attempted experimentally before. The expected impact of the proposed experiment is comparable to that of frequently measured “traditional” correlation coefficients (a,b,A,B,D) but offers completely different systematics and additional sensitivity to imaginary parts of the scalar and tensor couplings. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the challenging techniques such as the event-by-event decay kinematics reconstruction together with the electron polarimetry a test setup was installed at the cold neutron beam line PF1B at the Laue-Langevin Institute, Grenoble, France. In this contribution, the results of the first run as well as plans for the run in Autumn 2021 will be discussed.

A high-density and low-power (<300 mW/channel) data acquisition (DAQ) system integrating 2240 readout channels inside a single OpenVPX crate is presented. It is intended to be used in various applications, e.g. gaseous or scintillator-based particle detectors. 14 payload slots, controller and data concentrator communicate via a multi-gigabit backplane. Each payload slot consists of a front module for digital and a rear transition module for analog processing. A pair of modules implements 160 full readout chains including amplification/shaping, sampling, and feature extraction. The sampling rate and ADC resolution are configurable for 100-1000 MS/s and 14-8 bit, respectively. To extract the pulse arrival time we used a proper shaping of signals and a timing algorithm based on a non-linear rise approximation, which strongly reduces the sampling phase error, thus providing a good performance at moderate (100-250 MS/s) sampling rates. This allows raw data acquisition, arrival time extraction, energy calculation, and pile-up reconstruction for all 160 channels to be implemented in a single FPGA. It occupies less than 30% of its processing resources. The system was tested using the proton beam at COSY (Cooler Synchrotron) at Juelich Research Center (Germany). An off-detector DAQ with a 12-m long cabling was investigated. It introduces considerable additional thermal noise and crosstalk affecting the timing performance. For a sampling rate of 150 MS/s, the time resolution was found to be about 270 ps.

PANDA (anti-Proton ANnihiliation at DArmstadt) is planned to be one of the four main experiments at the future international accelerator complex FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany. It is going to address fundamental questions of hadron physics and quantum chromodynamics using cooled antiproton beams with a high intensity and and momenta between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c. PANDA is designed to reach a maximum luminosity of 2x10^32 cm^2 s. Most of the physics programs require an excellent particle identification (PID). The PID of hadronic states at the forward endcap of the target spectrometer will be done by a fast and compact Cherenkov detector that uses the detection of internally reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) principle. It is designed to cover the polar angle range from 5{\deg} to 22{\deg} and to provide a separation power for the separation of charged pions and kaons up to 3 standard deviations (s.d.) for particle momenta up to 4 GeV/c in order to cover the important particle phase space. This document describes the technical design and the expected performance of the novel PANDA Disc DIRC detector that has not been used in any other high energy physics experiment (HEP) before. The performance has been studied with Monte-Carlo simulations and various beam tests at DESY and CERN. The final design meets all PANDA requirements and guarantees suffcient safety margins.

The global polarization of Lambda hyperons along the total orbital angular momentum of a relativistic heavy-ion collision is presented based on the high statistics data samples collected in Au+Au collisions at root s(NN)= 2.4GeV and Ag+Ag at 2.55 GeV with the High-Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer (HADES) at GSI, Darmstadt. This is the first measurement below the strangeness production threshold in nucleon-nucleon collisions. Results are reported as a function of the collision centrality as well as a function of the hyperon's transverse momentum (p(T)) and rapidity (y(CM)) for the range of centrality 0-40%. We observe a strong centrality dependence of the polarization with an increasing signal towards peripheral collisions. For mid-central (20 - 40%) collisions the polarization magnitudes are < P-Lambda >(%) = 6.8 +/- 1.3 (stat.) +/- 2.1 (syst.) for Au+Au and < P-Lambda >(%) = 6.2 +/- 0.4 (stat.) +/- 0.6 (syst.) for Ag+Ag, which are the largest values observed so far. This observation thus provides a continuation of the increasing trend previously observed by STAR and contrasts expectations from recent theoretical calculations predicting a maximum in the region of collision energies about 3GeV. The observed polarization is of a similar magnitude as predicted by 3D-fluid-dynamics and the UrQMD plus thermal vorticity model and significantly above results from the AMPT model. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

K. Bodek, J. Choi, L. De Keukeleere, K. Dhanmeher, M. Engler, G. Gupta, A. Kozela, K. Lojek, K. Pysz, D. Ries, D. Rozpedzik,0,∗ N. Severijns, T. Soldner, 5 N. Yazdandoost, A. R. Young and J. Zejma Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland Department of Physics and Astronomy, NC State University, Raleigh, USA Institute of Nuclear and Radiation Physics, KU Leuven, Belgium Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow, Poland Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany 5 Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France E-mail: dagmara.rozpedzik@uj.edu.pl

In March 2019 the HADES experiment recorded 14 billion Ag+Ag collisions at √sNN = 2.55 GeV as a part of the FAIR phase-0 physics program. In this contribution, we present and investigate our capabilities to reconstruct and analyze weakly decaying strange hadrons and hypernuclei emerging from these collisions. The focus is put on measuring the mean lifetimes of these particles.

In this letter we report the first multi-differential measurement of correlated pion-proton pairs from 2 billion Au+Au collisions at sNN=2.42 GeV collected with HADES. In this energy regime the population of Δ(1232) resonances plays an important role in the way energy is distributed between intrinsic excitation energy and kinetic energy of the hadrons in the fireball. The triple differential d3N/dMπ±pdpTdy distributions of correlated π±p pairs have been determined by subtracting the πp combinatorial background using an iterative method. The invariant-mass distributions in the Δ(1232) mass region show strong deviations from a Breit-Wigner function with vacuum width and mass. The yield of correlated pion-proton pairs exhibits a complex isospin, rapidity and transverse-momentum dependence. In the invariant mass range 1.1

AbstractThe antiproton experiment PANDA at FAIR is designed to bring hadron physics to a new level in terms of scope, precision and accuracy. In this work, its unique capability for studies of hyperons is outlined. We discuss ground-state hyperons as diagnostic tools to study non-perturbative aspects of the strong interaction, and fundamental symmetries. New simulation studies have been carried out for two benchmark hyperon-antihyperon production channels: $${\bar{p}}p \rightarrow {\bar{\varLambda }}\varLambda $$ p ¯ p → Λ ¯ Λ and $${\bar{p}}p \rightarrow {\bar{\varXi }}^+\varXi ^-$$ p ¯ p → Ξ ¯ + Ξ - . The results, presented in detail in this paper, show that hyperon-antihyperon pairs from these reactions can be exclusively reconstructed with high efficiency and very low background contamination. In addition, the polarisation and spin correlations have been studied, exploiting the weak, self-analysing decay of hyperons and antihyperons. Two independent approaches to the finite efficiency have been applied and evaluated: one standard multidimensional efficiency correction approach, and one efficiency independent approach. The applicability of the latter was thoroughly evaluated for all channels, beam momenta and observables. The standard method yields good results in all cases, and shows that spin observables can be studied with high precision and accuracy already in the first phase of data taking with PANDA.

The study of baryon excitation spectra provides insight into the inner structure of baryons. So far, most of the world-wide efforts have been directed towards N^* and spectroscopy. Nevertheless, the study of the double and triple strange baryon spectrum provides independent information to the N^* and spectra. The future antiproton experiment P ANDA will provide direct access to final states containing a pair, for which production cross sections up to μ b are expected in p̅ p reactions. With a luminosity of L=10^31 cm ^-2 s ^-1 in the first phase of the experiment, the expected cross sections correspond to a production rate of ∼ 10^6 events /day . With a nearly 4π detector acceptance, P ANDA will thus be a hyperon factory. In this study, reactions of the type p̅ p → ^+ ^*- as well as p̅ p → ^*+ ^- with various decay modes are investigated. For the exclusive reconstruction of the signal events a full decay tree fit is used, resulting in reconstruction efficiencies between 3 and 5

The antiproton experiment PANDA at FAIR is designed to bring hadron physics to a new level in terms of scope, precision and accuracy. In this work, its unique capability for studies of hyperons is outlined. We discuss ground-state hyperons as diagnostic tools to study non-perturbative aspects of the strong interaction, and fundamental symmetries. New simulation studies have been carried out for two benchmark hyperon-antihyperon production channels: $${\bar{p}}p \rightarrow {\bar{\varLambda }}\varLambda $$ p ¯ p → Λ ¯ Λ and $${\bar{p}}p \rightarrow {\bar{\varXi }}^+\varXi ^-$$ p ¯ p → Ξ ¯ + Ξ - . The results, presented in detail in this paper, show that hyperon-antihyperon pairs from these reactions can be exclusively reconstructed with high efficiency and very low background contamination. In addition, the polarisation and spin correlations have been studied, exploiting the weak, self-analysing decay of hyperons and antihyperons. Two independent approaches to the finite efficiency have been applied and evaluated: one standard multidimensional efficiency correction approach, and one efficiency independent approach. The applicability of the latter was thoroughly evaluated for all channels, beam momenta and observables. The standard method yields good results in all cases, and shows that spin observables can be studied with high precision and accuracy already in the first phase of data taking with PANDA.