Relativistic Hypernuclei: Old Problems and New Prospects

The first experiments with relativistic hypernuclei (Bowen; Khorozov and Lukstins) were done many years ago. They demonstrated not only that such extremely difficult experiments are manageable but also their great advantage, a possibility of observing and studying independently the production and weak decay of hypernuclei: the points of the production and decay of relativistic hypernuclei are separated by tens of centimeters instead of some microns in classical experiments. At the same time these first experiments revealed a huge problem with selection of the proper trigger.Recently we proposed to explore a unique feature of the ⁹Be nucleus: after removing a neutron from its ground state several groups of alpha-particles appear from different excited states of a residual nucleus ⁸Be. Detection of the correlated pair of -particles produced in a vacuum volume at a distance of some 40 cm from target is an unambiguous signal of nonmesonic decay of hypernucleus ¹⁰ Be(++n+n) or ¹⁰ Be(++n+p). In this particular case it is possible to take exclusive decay rates (on different excited states of ⁸Be^*). This open a way for a phenomenological analysis of matrix elements of the four-baryon weak interaction.The experiment is approved for new accelerator Nuclotron at JINR, Dubna.