Speaker
Description
Since the prediction of the meson in 1935, facilities and institutions worldwide have contributed to the discovery of over 200 distinct types, including the pions, kaons, and J/Ψ. Meson spectroscopy involves understanding the properties of the mesons, allowing for the classification of this vast family of hadrons to be improved, which is particularly important for the discovery of new or exotic mesons – those forbidden in the naive quark model. In this endeavour, determining the spin of a meson is vitally important. A set of quantities known as moments of angular distributions provides information on the spin of a meson, which can be extracted from the angular distributions of its decay products. Jefferson Lab, located in Virginia, USA, is a high-luminosity, multi-GeV electron beam facility and is home to the CLAS12 detector, which is used to study the electro- and photo-production of meson resonances. This talk will present the preliminary results and novel analysis techniques developed for the extraction of moments of angular distributions of meson resonances decaying into a pair of oppositely charged kaons. These techniques involve improved particle identification based on the time-of-flight, cuts in longitudinal phase space to remove baryon resonances and the application of an MCMC-based algorithm. Preliminary moments of angular distributions will be shown, and properties of the resonances will be discussed.