The new BNL partial wave analysis programs

Abstract

Experiment E852 at Brookhaven National Laboratory is a meson spectroscopy experiment which took data at the Multi-Particle Spectrometer facility of the Alternating Gradient Syncrotron. Upgrades to the spectrometer`s data acquisition and trigger electronics allowed over 900 million data events, of numerous topologies, to be recorded to tape in 1995 running alone. One of the primary goals of E852 is identification of states beyond the quark model, i.e., states with gluonic degrees of freedom. Identification of such states involves the measurement of a systems spin-parity. Such a measurement is usually done using Partial Wave Analysis. Programs to perform such analyses exist, in fact, one was written at BNL and used in previous experiments by some of this group. This program, however, was optimized for a particular final state, and modification to allow analysis of the broad range of final states in E852 would have been difficult. The authors therefore decided to write a new program, with an eye towards generality that would allow analysis of a large class of reactions.