# P-wave dominance in the 𝒑⁢𝒅→^𝟑He𝝅⁺⁢𝝅⁻ reaction near threshold measured with the MOMO facility at COSY

## Abstract

The cross section for the $`pd^3\text{He}\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ reaction has been measured at the MOMO facility in a kinematically complete experiment at a c.m. excess energy of $`Q=70`$ MeV. The energy and angular distributions show that the reaction is dominated by $`p`$-wave $`\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ pairs. This is in complete contrast to the results of inclusive measurements at somewhat higher beam energies which show a strong $`s`$-wave ABC enhancement at low $`\pi \pi `$ masses. There are however indications of $`p`$-wave pion pairs from other experiments at low $`Q`$.   

preprint: ISKP-Preprint 12-98-1  

The measurements of inclusive meson production in the $`pd^3\text{He}X^0`$ reaction  are surprising, in that they show a strong enhancement for a missing mass of around 310 MeV with a width of only 50 MeV. The fact that no similar effect is seen for the $`{}_{}{}^{3}\text{H}X^+`$ final state suggests that this anomaly must be associated with the isospin-zero s-wave $`\pi \pi `$ system. On the other hand, since the observed mass and width of the peak both vary with beam energy $`T_p`$ , and it is known that the corresponding isoscalar $`\pi \pi `$ scattering length is small , it has generally been assumed that the anomaly must be kinematic in origin, possibly being associated with the production of two $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$-isobars in the reaction .

These inclusive measurements were carried out for $`T_p745`$ MeV , corresponding to c.m. kinetic energies in the final state $`Q190`$ MeV. To investigate such pion production in greater detail, with the objective of deducing also angular distributions, we have carried out an exclusive measurement of the $`pd^3\text{He}\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ reaction closer to threshold at $`Q=72`$ MeV ($`T_p=546`$ MeV).

The MOMO facility was installed at the external proton beam of the COSY proton synchrotron of the Forschungszentrum Jülich . The setup consists of a high granularity meson vertex detector near the target, with the high resolution 3Q2DQ magnetic spectrometer Big Karl  being placed in the forward direction. The acceptance of this spectrometer is $`\pm 25`$ mrad in the horizontal and $`\pm 100`$ mrad in the vertical directions. The charged particle tracks were measured in the focal plane by two stacks of multiwire drift chambers (MWDC) which yield position information in both the horizontal and the vertical directions. The $`{}_{}{}^{3}\text{He}`$’s were unambiguously identified by their time-of-flight and energy loss, as measured with two scintillator hodoscopes behind the MWDC’s, separated 2m from each other. By itself this gave a missing mass resolution in the $`pd^3\text{He}X`$ reaction of typically 1 MeV/c<sup>2</sup>. In order to make a kinematically complete identification of the events, the directions of the pions were measured in the MOMO vertex detector . This consists of 672 scintillating fibers, of circular profile with diameters of 2.5 mm, arranged in three planes tilted at 60<sup>o</sup> with respect to each other. The fibers are individually read out by 16-fold photomultipliers. The detector was placed perpendicular to the beam direction at 20 cm after the target, subtending an opening angle of $`\pm 45^0`$. A 4 cm diameter central hole allowed the $`{}_{}{}^{3}\text{He}`$’s and the undeflected proton beam to pass. A liquid deuterium target, 4 cm thick and 6 mm in diameter with 1 $`\mu `$m mylar windows , was placed in the MOMO vacuum chamber. A phosphorus screen, which could be lowered directly behind the target, showed the beam spot to be about 1 mm in diameter. A typical beam intensity of $`10^9`$ particles per second was used in the experiment.

An event with two charged particles in the vertex detector and a <sup>3</sup>He in Big Karl was considered to be a candidate for the $`pd^3\text{He}\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ reaction and its identification and complete reconstruction involved a 2C kinematic fit. Good events must be coplanar with respect to the total meson momentum axis, which is defined by the beam and the $`{}_{}{}^{3}\text{He}`$ momenta. The distribution in coplanarity of the coincident hits, shown in fig. 1, demonstrates that any background due to four-body reactions or random coincidences is at most a few per cent.

About 15,000 fully reconstructed $`pd^3\text{He}\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ events were obtained at a beam energy of 546 MeV. Although the overall acceptance of the MOMO apparatus is only about 2% of 4 $`\pi `$, it is well distributed over the complete phase space, with the exception of the maximum excitation energy of the pion pair, where at least one of the pions escapes the vertex detector. The measurements were performed with three settings of the Big Karl magnet and the consistency of the results obtained in the overlapping regions shows that the acceptance of the spectrometer is well understood.

The differential cross sections obtained are displayed in fig. 2 in terms of four of the possible kinematic variables. The absolute normalization was determined using various scattering monitors calibrated to about $`\pm 7`$%, and this is by far the largest contribution to the systematic error. The only accessible variable in single-arm experiments  is the pion-pion excitation energy $`T_{\pi \pi }=m_{\pi \pi }2m_\pi `$, where $`m_{\pi \pi }`$ is the two-pion effective mass, and the distribution in this is shown in fig. 2a. In marked contrast to the original ABC experiments , which showed an enhancement over phase space in the region of $`T_{\pi \pi }30`$ MeV, our data are pushed rather to maximum values of excitation energy. This strong energy dependence suggests that higher partial waves are contributing. On the other hand, the distribution in the $`\pi ^3`$He relative energy, shown in fig. 2b, is fairly consistent with phase space. This attests that the anomalous behaviour in $`T_{\pi \pi }`$ is not an artefact of the MOMO acceptance. Pure $`s`$-waves would lead to no dependence upon $`\theta _\pi `$, the angle between the proton and one of the pions in the overall c.m. system. The significant anisotropy shown in fig. 2c is therefore direct confirmation of the importance of higher partial waves. It should be noted that events with pions in the backward hemisphere would not in general be detected in the MOMO apparatus. A particularly interesting angular variable for the subsequent discussion is that between the relative $`\pi \pi `$ momentum and the beam direction in the overall c.m. system, and the corresponding distribution is shown in fig. 2d. Since no distinction is made in MOMO between the $`\pi ^+`$ and $`\pi ^{}`$, such a distribution must be symmetric about $`90^o`$, and it is striking that over most of the range the cross section is linear in $`\mathrm{sin}^2\theta _{\pi \pi p}`$.

It is seen that the $`\pi \pi `$ excitation energy distribution of fig. 2a is broadly compatible with phase space multiplied by $`T_{\pi \pi }`$. This, together with the linearity shown in fig. 2d, indicates that the $`\pi \pi `$ system is mainly produced with orbital angular momentum $`l=1`$, kinematically as if the two-pions were arising from the low mass tail of the $`\rho `$-meson! To make this hypothesis more quantitative, consider the simplest matrix element for the production of a $`p`$-wave $`\pi \pi `$ pair, which is

$$M=\sqrt{3}C\overline{u}_\tau \stackrel{}{ϵ}(\widehat{K}\times \stackrel{}{k})u_p,$$
(1)   
where $`\stackrel{}{ϵ}`$ is the deuteron polarisation vector, $`u_p`$ and $`u_\tau `$ are Pauli spinors describing respectively the initial proton and final <sup>3</sup>He, and $`C`$ is a constant. The beam momentum is denoted by $`\stackrel{}{K}`$ and the relative momentum of the two pions as $`\stackrel{}{k}=\frac{1}{2}(\stackrel{}{k}_1\stackrel{}{k}_2)`$.

This matrix element only allows pion pairs with $`m_l=\pm 1`$ along the beam direction and, squaring and averaging over spins, leads to

$$\overline{|M|^2}=|C|^2|\widehat{K}\times \stackrel{}{k}|^2=k^2|C|^2\mathrm{sin}^2\theta _{\pi \pi p},$$
(2)   
which immediately reproduces the angular dependence observed in fig. 2d.

After averaging over $`\theta _{\pi \pi p}`$, the differential cross section becomes

$$d\sigma =\overline{|M|^2}dLips=\frac{2}{3}|C|^2k^2dLips,$$
(3)   
where dLips is the Lorentz-invariant phase space. Since non-relativistically $`T_{\pi \pi }=k^2/m_\pi `$, eq. (3) immediately leads to the observed proportionality in $`T_{\pi \pi }`$ times phase space. This is shown as the solid curve in fig. 2a, which however was calculated including the small relativistic effects.

Despite the $`\pi \pi `$ $`p`$-wave hypothesis resulting in a large deviation from phase space for the distribution in pion-pion excitation energies, the modifications to the $`\pi `$-<sup>3</sup>He relative energy are extremely small and would actually vanish in the limit of infinite <sup>3</sup>He mass. This agrees well with the results shown in fig. 2b. Note that in our data cannot distinguish between the energy distributions of the $`\pi ^+`$ and $`\pi ^{}`$.

Experimentally the pions are preferentially emitted at large angles with respect to the beam direction and the $`p`$-wave hypothesis leads to an effect of this kind, though not quite as large as that implied by the experimental data shown in fig. 2c.

Although $`s`$-wave two-pion production has been observed in the $`pd^3\text{He}\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ reaction very close to threshold , and at $`Q200`$ MeV $`s`$-wave pion-pion pairs again dominate the spectrum through the ABC enhancement, it is clear from the present data that there is intermediate $`Q`$-range where $`p`$-waves are dominant. Similar behaviour is, however, observed in other experiments. The missing-mass distributions obtained for the $`npdX`$ reaction at $`Q200`$ MeV show a striking ABC effect , whereas at 70 MeV no ABC is seen . In the latter case the events are pushed to the maximum missing mass, which is consistent with the $`p`$-wave production seen in fig. 2a. Furthermore, recent data on the comparison of pion production in the $`\pi ^+d\pi ^+\pi ^+nn`$ and $`\pi ^+d\pi ^+\pi ^{}pp`$ reactions at $`Q100`$ MeV show that, whereas the $`\pi ^+\pi ^+`$ spectrum broadly follows phase space modulated by detector acceptance, the $`\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ data are again heavily biased towards the maximum value of $`T_{\pi \pi }`$ .

Kinematically our results are indistinguishable from the production of the low-mass part of the $`\rho `$-meson in $`pd^3\text{He}\rho ^0`$, with the $`\rho `$-mesons being formed with polarizations $`\pm 1`$ in the beam direction. Though there is some evidence from photoproduction for the $`\rho `$ mass being depressed in the mass-3 system , it is hard in our case to see why such production should become less important at the higher energies where the original inclusive measurements were performed . One possibility is that the effect is due to a rare decay of the $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ isobar since at $`Q=70`$ MeV the invariant mass with respect to a single nucleon is only 1290 MeV, which is well within the $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ width. Though favoured by isospin, and also offering a natural explanation for the non-observance at high $`Q`$, any dynamical model based on this idea would have to transfer one unit of angular momentum from the final to the initial state through the action of a recoil term.

Conventional models of ABC production  suggest that this arises through two independent $`p`$-wave pion productions, mediated by two $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ resonances, combining to give $`s`$-wave pion-pion pairs. At low energies one of these productions might be through an $`s`$-wave $`\pi N`$ system, leaving only one unit of angular momentum in the final state. However, given the importance of the $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ almost down to threshold, this is unlikely to play a major role here and, in any case, would tend to lead to $`p`$-waves between the pion and the <sup>3</sup>He.

Further clarification of the reaction mechanism will be provided through a study of the variation of the $`pd^3\text{He}\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ cross sections with beam energy, data on which are currently being analyzed. Since all events with a $`{}_{}{}^{3}\text{He}`$ in the focal plane have been written on tape, it is furthermore hoped to deduce the $`\pi ^0\pi ^0`$ excitation spectra through a subtraction of the exclusive data from that obtained inclusively purely using the spectrometer.

Experiments are currently being performed on exclusive $`pd^3\text{He}K^+K^{}`$ production at similar $`Q`$-values and it will be very interesting to see whether the $`\varphi `$’s produced in this reaction have a similar alignment to that observed for the $`p`$-wave pion-pion pairs.

We wish to thank the COSY crew for providing the high quality beam and the Big Karl technical staff for their untiring efforts. This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft and the IKP Jülich.