Light Scalar Mesons in Charm Decays.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 2 0 6 0 7 5 v 1 2 8 J u n 2 0 0 2 Light Scalar Mesons in Charm Meson Decays Ignacio Bediaga Representing the Fermilab E791 Collaboration Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas F??sicas, Rua Xavier Sigaud 150, 22290, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil bediaga@cbpf.br Abstract We present recent results on scalar light mesons based on Dalitz plot anal- yses of charm decays from Fermilab experiment E791. Low mass scalar mesons are found to have large contributions to the decays studied, D+ → K?π+π+ and D+,D+ s → π?π+π+. These results demonstrate the importance of charm decays as a new environment for the study of light meson physics. 1 Introduction Here we present an overview of the results we obtained analysing the decays D+ s → π?π+π+ [1], D+ → π?π+π+ [2] and D+ → K?π+π+ [3], using data collected in 1991/92 by Fermilab experiment E791 from 500GeV/cπ??nucleon interactions. For details see [ref791]. To obtain these results, we had to introduce a new approach in Dalitz plot analysis in order to extract the mass and width of the scalar resonances by allowing them as floating parameters in the fit. We begin this paper presenting the general method, applied in the D+ → K?π+π+ Dalitz-plot analysis, then we discuss the D+ s → π?π+π+ and D+ → π?π+π+ studies using the same procedure. 2 The D+ → K?π+π+ Dalitz-plot Analysis From the original 2 × 1010 events collected by E791, and after reconstruction and selection criteria, we obtained the k?π+π+ sample shown in Figure 1(a). The cross- hatched region contains the events selected for the Dalitz-plot analysis. There are 15090 events in this sample, of which 6% are background. Figure 1(b) shows the Dalitz-plot for these events. The plot presents a rich struc- ture, where we can observe the clear bands from K ? (890)π+, and an accumulation of events at the upper edge of the diagonal, due to heavier resonances. To study the res- onant substructure, we perform an unbinned maximun-likelihood fit to the data, with 1 Figure 1