Delayed antiproton annihilation in light atoms
Voronin A. Yu., Dal'karov O. D.
A mechanism for delayed annihilation in He+p and Li+p clusters is analyzed in the coupled-channel model. A cascade of virtual Auger transitions is shown to be the primary mechanism for the decay of metastable antiproton states in atoms with Z>2. The lifetime of the long-lived fraction (—1%) of the antiprotons captured in atomic Li is predicted to be on the order of 10~7 s. © 1994 American Institute of Physics.