Prism plot analysis of the reaction π+p → p π+πo at 16 GeV/ c

Abstract

A study of the reaction π +p → p π + π o at 16 GeV/ c incident momentum has been made using the prism plot analysis to reject background events arising from elastic and multineutral contaminations and to separate different reaction channels ( ϱ +p, g +p, Δ + π +, Δ ++ π o , π + (p π o ) DD). Cross sections, invariant mass distributions and production and decay angular distributions are presented. For the channel corresponding to proton diffraction dissociation strong violation of both s- and t-channel helicity conservation is found for low values of the (p π o ) mass. We demonstrate that the prism plot method provides a better separation of background events than conventional methods using kinematic cuts.