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Title: Charm production by muons and its role in scale-noninvariance

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/6520891· OSTI ID:6520891

Interactions of 209 GeV muons in the Multimuon Spectrometer at Fermilab have yielded more than 8 x 10/sup 4/ events with two muons in the final state. After reconstruction and cuts, the data contain 20,072 events with (81 +- 10)% attributed to the diffractive production of charmed states decaying to muons. The cross section for diffractive charm muoproduction is 6.9(+1.9,-1.4) nb where the error includes systematic uncertainties. Extrapolated to Q/sup 2/ = 0 with sigma(Q/sup 2/) = sigma(0)(1 + Q/sup 2//..lambda../sup 2/)/sup -2/, the effective cross section for 178 (100) GeV photons is 750(+180,-130) (560(+200,-120)) nb and the parameter ..lambda.. is 3.3 +- 0.2 (2.9 +- 0.2) GeV/c. The ..nu.. dependence of the cross section is similar to that of the photon-gluon-fusion model. A first determination of the structure function for diffractive charm production indicates that charm accounts for approximately 1/3 of the scale-noninvariance observed in inclusive muon-nucleon scattering at low Bjorken x. Okubo-Zweig-Iizuka selection rules and unitarity allow the muon data to set a 90%-confidence lower limit on the psi N total cross section of 0.9 mb.

Research Organization:
Princeton Univ., NJ (USA). Dept. of Physics
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-76ER03072
OSTI ID:
6520891
Report Number(s):
DOE/ER/03072-T3; TRN: 81-007869
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Thesis
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English