On the different role of protons and neutrons in antinucleon annihilations on nuclei

Abstract

We compare data of antineutron and antiproton annihilation cross sections on different targets at very low energies. After subtracting Coulomb effects, we observe that the ratio between the antineutron proton and antiproton proton annihilation cross sections is an oscillating function of the energy at momenta smaller 300 MeV/c. This nontrivial behavior is confirmed by the analysis of the relative number of antiproton-neutron and antiproton-proton annihilations in nuclei. We show that a part of the strong shadowing phenomena in antiproton-nucleus annihilations can be explained in terms of this oscillation, while a part requires different explainations.