Chiral approach to antikaons in dense matter

Abstract

Antikaons in dense nuclear matter are studied using a chiral unitary approach which incorporates the s- and p-waves of the $\bar K$ N interaction. We include, in a self-consistent way, Pauli blocking effects, meson self-energies modified by nuclear short-range correlations and baryon binding potentials. We show that the on-shell factorization cannot be applied to evaluate the in-medium corrections to p-wave amplitudes. We also obtain an attractive shift for the Λ and Σ masses of −30 MeV at saturation density while the Σ* width gets sensibly increased to about 80 MeV. The moderate attraction developed by the antikaon does not support the existence of very deep and narrow bound states.