APPLICATION OF MASS FORMULAS FOR MULTIPLY STRANGE NUCLEI

Recent relativistic mean field calculations by Schaffner et al. predic t the existence of a broad class of multiply strange nuclei, composed of neutrons, protons, Lambda's and Xi's, with density rho approximate to 2 rho(0), strangeness fraction \S\/A approximate to 1 and charge fr action q/A approximate to 0, comparable to the properties of hypothesi zed strange quark matter. These features are well reproduced by a gene ralized Bethe-Weizsacker mass formula which is used here to derive str ong-decay stability regions and weak-decay patterns for multi-strange baryonic nuclei.