Elucidating Strangeness with Electromagnetic Probes

by Asli Acar (University of York)

Friday 3 Jul 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

Strangeness provides a powerful window into non-perturbative QCD. With an intermediate mass between light and heavy quarks, strange quarks break SU(3) flavour symmetry strongly while still remaining in the regime of fully relativistic, strongly coupled dynamics. This makes strange hadrons an excellent probe for understanding how QCD organizes the excited hadron spectrum.

Cascade baryons are of particular interest: only a small fraction of the predicted states are well established in the PDG, and their production mechanisms remain poorly understood. Their doubly-strange nature provides additional constraints on allowed diquark configurations and offers sensitivity to exotic structures, including potential hadronic molecules and compact multiquark states. The ability to study multiple decay channels and branching ratio line shapes with high precision makes them especially valuable for disentangling these scenarios.

This work presents an analysis of CLAS12 data from Jefferson Lab aimed at studying excited cascade baryons, with the goal of extracting their branching ratios and quantum numbers. The potential to search for doubly strange exotic states, analogous to recently observed double-charm exotics at LHCb, is also explored.