Deep Subthreshold Ξ - Production in Ar+KCl Reactions at 1.76A GeV

We report first results on a deep subthreshold production of the doubly strange hyperon XI{sup -} in a heavy-ion reaction. At a beam energy of 1.76A GeV the reaction Ar+KCl was studied with the High Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer at SIS18/GSI. A high-statistics and high-purity LAMBDA sample was collected, allowing for the investigation of the decay channel XI{sup -}->LAMBDApi{sup -}. The deduced XI{sup -}/(LAMBDA+SIGMA{sup 0}) production ratio of (5.6+-1.2{sub -1.7}{sup +1.8})x10{sup -3} is significantly larger than available model predictions.