Investigation into the feasibility of a soft muon experiment
Issues relevant in a soft ({lt} 5 GeV) muon pair experiment at the AGS or the RHIC central region are investigated. Observation of direct muon pairs is difficult because the muon pair to pion ratio is {omicron} (10{sup {minus}4}). Absorber penetration is the only means available to identify high energy muons among a large number of hadrons. Three important sources of background are sail-through hadrons that fail to interact in the absorber, the decays of pions and kaons to muons in the absorber, and leakage of hadronic shower products through the absorber. An absorber thick enough to limit the ratio of combinatorical background pairs to pions to {omicron} (10{sup {minus}4}) imposes a significant muon kinetic energy threshold due to muon range in the absorber. Absorbers with low atomic number Z are preferred to keep this threshold low, and to avoid loss of invariant mass resolution due to energy loss straggling and multiple coulomb scattering. Long-lived meson to muon decays can be directly suppressed only by picking an absorber with short interaction length, which implies a high density, high Z material. With sufficiently high statistics, a subtraction of the spectra of like-sign pairs from the spectrum of opposite-sign pairs should recover the direct muon pair spectrum. 9 refs., 9 figs., 2 tabs.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (USA)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE/ER
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-84OR21400
- OSTI ID:
- 6688483
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-900331-13; ON: DE90015541; TRN: 90-025519
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Workshop on heavy ion physics at the alternating gradient synchrotron, Upton, NY (USA), 3-7 Mar 1990
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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KAONS
WEAK PARTICLE DECAY
MUON PAIRS
MUON DETECTION
PIONS
DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS
REST MASS
TRANSVERSE MOMENTUM
BOSONS
CHARGED PARTICLE DETECTION
DECAY
DETECTION
ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
FUNCTIONS
HADRONS
LINEAR MOMENTUM
MASS
MESONS
PARTICLE DECAY
PSEUDOSCALAR MESONS
RADIATION DETECTION
STRANGE MESONS
STRANGE PARTICLES
645102* - High Energy Physics- Particle Interactions & Properties-Experimental- Weak Interactions & Properties