Electroproduction of hypernuclei

Hypernuclear spectroscopy has received considerable attention lately, because it is an essential tool for the study of the hyperon-nucleon interaction; this, in turn, is believed to play an important role in dense nuclear matter, such as neutron star interiors. In particular, the current experimental research is focusing on (e, e' K) reactions on various nuclear targets, with an extensive measurement program being carried out at Jefferson National Laboratory. With the aim of contributing to the theoretical understanding of electroproduction of hypernuclei, we develop a formalism for the evaluation of triple differential cross sections using the impulse approximation. We also develop a Python program for the numerical calculation of these cross sections, and we present our results for the unpolarized triple differential cross section of the e+12-C → e' + K + 12-Λ-B reaction. We find that our results are in agreement with previous calculations; the cross section is a smoothly decreasing function of the kaon polar angle for different combinations of particle-hole orbitals in the hypernucleus as well as for different kinematical conditions.