Structure and processes with pionic atoms


  Miron Amusia  ,  Larissa V Chernusheva  
"Racah Insititute of Physics, Jerusalem 91904, Israel"
"Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg 194021, Israel"

We investigate ground state properties of atoms, in which substitute fermions – electrons by bosons, namely - mesons. We perform some calculations in the frame of modified Hartree-Fock (HF) equation. The modification takes into account symmetry, instead of anti-symmetry of the pair identical bosons wave function. The modified HF approach thus enhances (doubles) the effect of self-action for the boson case. Therefore, we accordingly modify the HF equations by eliminating the self-action terms “by hand”. The contribution of meson-meson and meson-nucleon non-Coulomb interaction is inessential at least for atoms with low and intermediate nuclear charge, which is our main subject. We found that the binding energy of pion negative ions , pion atoms , and the number of extra bound pions increases with the growth of nuclear charge Z. For e.g. Xe . As an example of a simple process with a pion atom, we consider photoionization that differs essentially from that for electron atoms. Namely, it is not monotonic decreasing from the threshold but has instead a prominent maximum above threshold. We study also elastic scattering of pions by pion atoms