Chiral unitary approach to the K^- deuteron scattering length

Abstract

Starting from a recent model where the Kbar N amplitudes are evaluated from the chiral Lagrangians using a coupled channel unitary method, we evaluate here the scattering length for K^- deuteron scattering. We find that the double scattering contribution is very large compared to the impulse approximation and that the charge exchange contribution of this rescattering is as large as the sequential K^- scattering on the two nucleons. Higher order rescattering corrections are evaluated using coupled channels with K^- and Kbar^0 within the integral form of the fixed centre approximation to the Faddeev equations. The higher order corrections involving intermediate pions and hyperons are found negligible.