Charm Hadroproduction at Fermilab E769

TL;DR

This paper reports on the Fermilab E769 experiment which collected extensive data on high-energy hadron interactions, aiming to study charm meson and baryon production through advanced detection and reconstruction techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset of 500 million hadron interactions and demonstrates preliminary charm decay signals using innovative tagging and microprocessor-based reconstruction methods.

Findings

Detection of D0 and D+ charm meson mass peaks

Use of Cerenkov counter and TRD for particle tagging

Progress in analyzing charm production dependence on various factors

Abstract

E769 has just recorded on tape the interactions of 500 million pions, kaons, and protons. A Cerenkov counter and a TRD were used to tag beam particle types in both positive and negative 250 GeV/c hadron beams. Thin foil Be, Al, Cu, and W targets were used with a spectrometer including silicon microstrips to look for charm decay vertices. Preliminary results show D0 --> K- pi+ and D+ --> K- pi+ pi+ mass peaks. As the event reconstruction progresses on numerous parallel microprocessors, we intend to explore the pT, xF, A, and flavor dependence of the production of charmed mesons and baryons.