Chandavar and Hicks Present Photoproduction of Scalar Mesons at CLAS

Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Shloka Chandavar and Dr. Kenneth Hicks, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, along with Dennis Weygand from the Jefferson Lab, present “Photoproduction of scalar mesons at CLAS” at the fall meeting of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society on Oct. 25. Graduate student Nicholas Compton also attended the meeting.

Shloka Chandavar

“A single gluon, which carries color charge, cannot exist independently outside a hadron. Lattice QCD calculations in pure SU(3), however, predict the existence of glueballs which are bound states of two or more gluons. In the real world, the challenge to identify glueballs experimentally is the fact they mix with meson states,” says their abstract. “The f₀(1500) is one of several candidates for the lightest glueball, with J^PC=0⁺⁺. We investigate the presence of this particle in photoproduction by analyzing the reaction γp→f_Jp→K⁰_SK⁰_Sp→2(π⁺π⁻)p. This reaction was studied using data from the g12 experiment performed using the CLAS detector at Jefferson Lab. A preliminary partial wave analysis, performed on the K⁰_SK⁰_S invariant mass spectrum, will be presented. These results update those presented for this reaction channel at previous conferences.”

This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.