Meson Exchange Currents in Kaon Scattering on the Lightest Nuclei

Abstract

The K^+ scattering on the lightest nuclei, d, 3He and 4He is studied in the framework of multiple scattering theory. Effects from MEC tied to the K^+N-->KNpi reaction are evaluated. We found that at momentum transfers Q^2<0.5 (GeV/c)^2 contributions from MEC are much smaller than kaon rescattering corrections. This makes the conventional multiple scattering picture a reliable tool to study these reactions in this kinematical domain and to extract the K^+n scattering amplitude from the K^+d data. At larger transferred momentum MEC can become more relevant.

Comments: revtex, 16 pages, 6 figures