The properties of the antikaons in nuclear matter are investigated from a chiral unitary approach which incorporates the $s$- and $p$-waves of the $\overline{K}N$ interaction. To obtain the in-medium meson-baryon amplitudes we include, in a self-consistent way, Pauli blocking effects, meson self-energies corrected by nuclear short-range correlations and baryon binding potentials. We pay special attention to investigating the validity of the on-shell factorization, showing that it cannot be applied in the evaluation of the in-medium corrections to the $p$-wave amplitudes. In nuclear matter at saturation energy, the Λ and Σ develop an attractive potential of about −30 MeV, while the ${\Sigma }^{*}$ pole remains at the free space value although its width gets sensibly increased to about 80 MeV. The antikaon also develops a moderate attraction that does not support the existence of very deep and narrow bound states, confirming the findings of previous self-consistent calculations.

• Received 10 March 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.74.015203