M. Sato, Nobu Terada, M. Ejima, Nobuyuki Chiga, Takatsugu Ishikawa, Y. Ma, S. Kameoka, Brian Beckford, Hajime Shimizu, H. Nomura, T. Watanabe, T. Terasawa, H. Yamauchi, T. Fujii, K. Yokota, A. Okuyama, Kenji Hosomi, A. Ohtani, D. Uchida, T. Takahashi, Osamu Hashimoto, Hirokazu Tamura, Osamu Konno, T. Kinoshita, D. Kawama, Y. C. Han, C. Kimura, T. Yamamoto, N. Taniya, Y. Miura, P. Bydžovský, T. Kawasaki, T. Kon, Y. Fujii, T. Fujibayashi, Kotaro Shirotori, A. Shichijo, T. Otani, M. Sotona, Y. Miyagi, N. Maruyama, Kazushige Maeda, H. Miyahara, H. Yamazaki, Kenta Futatsukawa, K. Suzuki, Mifuyu Ukai, Satoshi Nakamura, Hiroaki Tsubota, Hiroki Kanda, T. S. Wang, S. Kiyokawa, T. Nakabayashi, H. Kato, Tadaaki Tamae, A. Iguchi, A. Matsumura, Toshiyuki Gogami, Takeshi Koike, K. Miwa, Kyo Tsukada, A. Sasaki, Kentaro Hirose, and Masashi Kaneta
The elementary photo-strangeness production process has been intensively studied based on the high-quality data of the charged kaon channel, γ + p → K+ + Λ(Σ0). However, there had been no reliable data for the neutral kaon channel γ + n → K0 + Λ(Σ0) and the theoretical investigations suffer seriously from the lack of the data. In order to have reliable data for the neutral kaon photo-production data, substantial effort has been made to measure the γ + n → K0 + Λ process in the π+π- decay channel, using a liquid deuterium target and a tagged photon beam (Eγ = 0.8-1.1 GeV ) in the threshold region at the Laboratory of Nuclear Science (LNS), Tohoku University. We have taken exploratory data quite successfully with the use of Neutral Kaon Spectrometer (NKS) at LNS-Tohoku in 2003 and 2004. The data is compared to theoretical models and it indicates a hint that the K0 differential cross section has a backward peak in the energy region. The second generation of the experiment, NKS2, is designed to extend the NKS experiment by considerably upgrading the original neutral kaon spectrometer, fully replacing the spectrometer magnet, tracking detectors and all the trigger counters. The new spectrometer NKS2 has significantly larger acceptance for neutral kaons compared with NKS, particularly covering forward angles and much better invariant mass resolution. The estimated acceptance of NKS2 is three (ten) times larger for [Formula: see text] than that of NKS. The spectrometer is newly constructed and installed at the Laboratory of Nuclear Science, Tohoku University in 2005. The deuterium target data was taken with tagged photon beam in 2006-2007. We will report recent results of NKS2 in this paper. Additionally, a status of the upgrade project that gives us larger acceptance and capability of K0 + Λ coincidence measurement will be presented.