Pion-induced transport of π mesons in nuclei

A large body of data for pion-induced neutral pion continuum spectra spanning outgoing energies near 180 MeV shows no dip there that might be ascribed to internal strong absorption processes involving the formation of Δ’s. This is the same observation previously made for the charged pion continuum spectra. Calculations in an intranuclear cascade model or a cascade exciton model with free-space parameters predict such a dip for both neutral and charged pions. We explore several medium modifications to the interactions of pions with internal nucleons that are able to reproduce the data for nuclei from 7Li through Bi