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Hadronic interaction of eta and eta-prime mesons with nucleons

Due to their short life-time, flavour-neutral mesons cannot be utilized as free secondary beams or targets, and therefore a study of their interaction with nucleons is not possible via direct scattering experiments. This interaction is, however, accessible via its influence on the energy dependence - and on the phase space distributions of the cross sections for reactions in which these mesons are produced. In case of the p p --> p p eta reaction the experimentally determined distributions of the differential cross sections close to the production threshold cannot be described by taking into account the S-wave proton-proton and proton-eta interaction only. Here we show that the angular distributions determined at the COSY-11 facility reveal some evidence for P-wave admixture in the proton-proton subsystem already at an excess energy as low as Q = 15.5 MeV. We also present that one can estimate the relative strength of the eta-nucleon and eta-prime-nucleon interactions by comparison of the eta and eta-prime production yield.