Search for popcorn mesons in events with two charmed baryons.

摘要

The physics of this dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part measures the Λc → pi kp continuum momentum spectrum at a center of mass energy of 10.54 GeV/c, which is just below the &Ugr;(4s) resonance. The data sample consists of 15,400 Λc baryons from 9.46 fb-1 of integrated luminosity collected with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. 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 Λc → K0p mode, and look for events with a Λc+ and a Λ c- 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-1. We find 619 events after background subtraction. After a subtraction of 1.06+/-.09 charged pions coming from decays of known resonances to Λc + npi, we are left with 2.63+/-.21 additional charged pious in each of these events. This is significantly higher than the .5 popcorn mesons per bayon 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.