We study the possibility of binding eight quarks in a molecular hadronic system composed of two nucleons and an antikaon, with the quantum numbers of a hexaquark flavor, in particular, with strangeness $-1$, isospin $1/2$, parity -, baryonic number 2, and two possible spins, 0 or 1. We discuss the possible production of this hadron in the experiments which are presently investigating hot topics like the ${\Theta }^{+}$ pentaquark or the $K^{-}$ deeply bound in nuclei. The $K^{-}•N$ interactions and the coupling to other channels are computed microscopically from a confining and chiral invariant quark model resulting in local plus separable Gaussian potentials. The $N•N$ interactions used here are the state of the art Nijmegen potentials. The binding energy and the decay rate of the $K^{-}•N$ and $K^{-}•N•N$ systems are computed with configuration space variational methods.

• Received 3 January 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.031502