Identification of strange particles

Once the tracks have been reconstructed in the silicon telescope, the strange particles are identified via the kinematical analysis of their decay modes. Figures 1 and 2 show a diagram of the decay modes of interest for , and .

Figure 1: Scheme of the decay of a and of of a in the charged final state.

Figure 2: Scheme of the decay of a (cascade) in the charged final state.



A set of geometrical cuts are applied in order to reject the background. The candidates are required to be kinematically unambiguous with the , and the candidates to be unambiguous with the decays [1,2,3]. The quality of the data can be judged from the plots in figure 3 and 4.

Figure 3: Invariant mass distribution for a sample of , and in Pb+Pb events.
Get the postscript here.

Figure 4: versus invariant mass for Pb+Pb events. Both and signals are visible.
Get postscript here.

References:

  1. I. Kralik et al., Nucl. Phys. A638 (1998) 115c.

  2. S. Abatzis et al., Nucl. Phys. A590 (1995) 307c.

  3. S. Abatzis et al., Phys. Lett. B400 (1997) 223.



Centrality measurement

The charged particle multiplicity measured by the MSD in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c has been analysed in the framework of the Wounded Nucleon Model (WNM). The WNM assumes that the average multiplicity in a collision is proportional to the number of wounded nucleons ():

where q is the proportionality constant. The WNM provides a good description of the WA97 and NA57 multiplicity distributions both with respect to the shape and of the absolute normalization of the spectra.

For results and more information see:



Tranverse mass spectra

The WA97 experiment has measured the transverse mass spectra for negative hadrons and strange particles produced at mid-rapidity in Pb-Pb collisions. The double differential distributions for each particle and for each multiplicity class were fitted using the expression

where is the transverse mass. We assume the rapidity distribution to be flat in our acceptance region, and leave the inverse slope parameter T as a free parameter of the fit.

For results and more informations see:



Measured yields

Particle yields per event (Y) have been measured for p+Be, p+Pb and Pb+Pb events as a function of the number of wounded nucleons.

For results and more informations see:

The numerical values of the yields can be found here.


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