Nuclear Medium Effects from Hadronic Atoms

The state of the art in the study of π⁻, K⁻ and ∑⁻ atoms, along with the in-medium nuclear interactions deduced for these hadrons, is reviewed. A special emphasis is placed on recent developments in -nuclear physics, where a strongly attractive density dependent K⁻-nuclear potential of order 150–200MeV in nuclear matter emerges by fitting K⁻-atom data. This has interesting repercussions on quasibound nuclear states, on the composition of strange hadronic matter and on condensation in self bound hadronic systems.