Structure of Events Containing Direct Photon or Neutral Pion in Hadronic Interactions

Abstract

Fermilab Experiment E706 studies quark and gluon interactions by analyzing the yield of $\pi^0$'s, single photons and the accompanying hadrons in the collisions of charged pions and protons with nucleons. The pho- tons emerging directly from the hard scattering of partons (direct photons) and the hadrons accompanying them provide information about the parton subprocesses. In this experiment the events were triggered by a large trans- verse momentum electromagnetic shower in a liquid argon calorimeter. The charged particle spectrometer consisted of a set of silicon strip detectors, a set of multiwire proportional chambers and a dipole magnet. The data analysis shows evidence for jet structure in the events which contain either a high transverse momentum (above 4 GeV /c) single photon or neutral pion. After reconstructing the directions of these jets, a study of the properties of the hadrons in these jets and of the underlying parton level kinematics is done. In this thesis, an overview of the experiment is presented along with a detailed description of the hardware and software of the charged particle tracking system. This is followed by a discussion of the analysis of the jets in the events selected from the data from the first run of the experiment in 1987-88.