Antistrange meson-baryon interaction in hot and dense nuclear matter

2014

We present a study of in-medium cross sections and (off-shell) transition rates for the most relevant binary reactions for strange pseudoscalar meson production close to threshold in heavy-ion collisions at FAIR energies. Our results rely on a chiral unitary approach in coupled channels which incorporates the $s$- and $p$-waves of the kaon-nucleon interaction. The formalism, which is modified in the hot and dense medium to account for Pauli blocking effects, mean-field binding on baryons, and pion and kaon self-energies, has been improved to implement full unitarization and self-consistency for both the $s$- and $p$-wave interactions at finite temperature and density. This gives access to i…