HYPER · When antimatter meets strangeness: a new era for precision hypernuclear physics

Observable hadronic matter is mostly composed of u, d quarks. The strangeness degree of freedom is expected to play an important role in dense nuclear matter in the form of hyperons, baryons with at least one valence strange quark. Hyperons can form bound nuclear systemswith nucleons and create short-lived hypernuclei which decay on the time-scale of the weak interaction (typically ∼200 ps). Our knowledge of nuclear matter is so far restricted to precision nucleon scattering and nuclear data while a generalisation to other quark flavours lacks precision data.HYPER pioneers a new production mechanism of hypernuclei from antimatter. HYPER will explore the terra incognita of the strange nuclear landscape with unprecedented capabilities. The measured precision ground-state properties and spectroscopy of single-lambda hypernuclei along isotopic chains, from neutron deficient to neutron rich, will give access to the isospin properties of the many-body interactions involving lambda hyperons, and thus to the role of strangeness in the nuclear equation of state and in neutron stars.The core of HYPER is the development of a new multi-purpose detector with high sensitivity, energy and timing resolutions to be used at the Antimatter Factory of CERN. HYPER has the potential to seed a hypernuclei factory in Europe.