Search for Popcorn Mesons in Events with Two Charmed Baryons

Hartfiel, Brandon

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

关键词: Pions;    A Centers;    Decay;    Fragmentation;    Luminosity;   

DOI  :  10.2172/885509
RP-ID  :  SLAC-R-823
RP-ID  :  AC02-76SF00515
RP-ID  :  885509

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

The physics of this note is divided into two parts. The first part measures the {Lambda}{sub c} {yields} {pi}kp continuum momentum spectrum at a center of mass energy of 10.54 GeV/c. The data sample consists of 15,400 {Lambda}{sub c} baryons from 9.46 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity. With more than 13 times more data than the best previous measurement, we are able to exclude some of the simpler, one parameter fragmentation functions. In the second part, we add the {Lambda}{sub c} {yields} K{sup 0}p mode, and look for events with a {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +} and a {bar {Lambda}}{sub c}{sup -} in order to look for ''popcorn'' mesons formed between the baryon and antibaryon. We add on-resonance data, with a kinematic cut to eliminate background from B decays, as well as BaBar run 3 and 4 data to increase the total data size to 219.70 fb{sup -1}. We find 619 events after background subtraction. After a subtraction of 1.06 {+-} .09 charged pions coming from decays of known resonances to {Lambda}{sub c} + {eta}{pi}, we are left with 2.63 {+-} .21 additional charged pions in each of these events. This is significantly higher than the .5 popcorn mesons per baryon pair used in the current tuning of Pythia 6.2, the most widely used Monte Carlo generator. The extra mesons we find appear to be the first direct evidence of popcorn mesons, although some of them could be arising from hypothetical unresolved, unobserved charmed baryon resonances contributing decay mesons to our data. To contribute a significant fraction, this hypothesis requires a large number of such broad unresolved states and seems unlikely, but can not be completely excluded.