language: en

[Confidential: not for distribution. Submitted to IOP Publishing for peer review]

7 February 2010

Strangeness production at (sub)threshold energies

N. Herrman

(FOPI collaboration)

Physikalisches Institut der Universität Heidelberg,
Philosophenweg 12, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
herrmann@physi.uni-heidelberg.de

Strange particles allow to probe the properties of hot and dense baryonic matter. At incident energies close to the production threshold medium effects on the strange hadrons are magnified. New data obtained with the recently completed FOPI upgrade are presented for the system Ni+Ni at 1.91 AGeV and discussed in comparison to earlier findings. Special emphasis is put to the search for multi-baryonic strange bound states, of which the Λp- channel is analyzed in detail.

1. Introduction