Chirally motivated (K)over-barN amplitudes for in-medium applications

A new fit of a chirally motivated coupled-channel model for meson-baryon interactions is presented including the recent SIDDHARTA data on the Is level characteristics of kaonic hydrogen. The kaon-nucleon amplitudes generated by the model are fully consistent with our earlier studies. We argue that a sharp increase of the real part of the in-medium K- p amplitude at subthreshold energies provides a link between the shallow (K) over bar -nuclear optical potentials obtained microscopically from threshold (K) over barN interactions and the phenomenological deep ones deduced from kaonic atoms data. The impact on the A-dependence of the Lambda-hypernuclear formation rates measured in reactions with stopped kaons is discussed too. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.