Femto-Strong aims to perform a unique high precision measurement of the strong interaction between antikaons and deuterons. A new experimental observable in the strangeness sector of low-energy QCD will be delivered by the first study of the low momentum correlations of antikaon-deuteron pairs via femtoscopy, using ALICE data on proton-proton from the LHC Run-2 and the upcoming Run-3.

  The strangeness sector in the low-energy regime of QCD is the ideal playground to test our knowledge of the interplay between spontaneous and explicit chiral symmetry breaking mechanisms. One of the key focuses in this sector is to study the strength and behaviour of the ̄KN interaction, with implications for assessing the possible formation of an extremely dense state of matter with strangeness content, and consequently for the Equation of State. A peculiarity of this interaction is the existence of a resonance just 27 MeV below threshold, the Λ(1405). Predictions on ̄KN scattering amplitudes within different theoretical approaches show a similar behaviour above threshold, where the experimental constraints are provided by old and imprecise scattering experiments, but large discrepancies arise in the sub-threshold region. The use of non-traditional femtoscopy applied to antikaon-deuteron pairs provides a unique experimental approach imposing new and rigorous constraints to the models in a yet unexplored region. 

  Moreover, the project aims to strength the network between theoreticians and experimentalists working in the field, and in particular between complementary experimental approaches, as the ones represented by the kaonic deuterium measurement by SIDDHARTA-2 at the INFN in Frascati, and the femtoscopic measurement here proposed with ALICE. 

  Within Femto-Strong, new analysis techniques in femtoscopy will be implemented in the determination of the characteristics of the particle source, and also novel particle identification techniques will be used.

Oton Vazquez Doce – INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati
I am an experimental physicist at the LNF-INFN as a fellow for the FELLINI project. I am a member of the ALICE and SIDDHARTA-2 collaborations, studying the interactions among hadrons containing strange quarks.

I started my research at the University of Santiago de Compostela with my PhD on the pionium lifetime determination at the DIRAC experiment at CERN. I was a INFN postdoc enrolling in the SIDDHARTA and AMADEUS experiments investigating kaon-nucleon interactions. Lastly, I was a fellow of the Excellence Cluster Universe and TU in Munich, where I studied heavy ion collisions at the LHC with ALICE.