A short introduction to the WA102 experiment

Experiment WA102 (Annecy LAPP, Athens, Bergen, Birmingham, CERN, Dubna JINR, IISN Belgium, Oslo, Protvino IHEP, Tsukuba KEK) searches for non-qqbar mesons produced in the central region in the reaction

pp -> pf (X0) ps

at 450 GeV/c using the CERN Omega Spectrometer and GAMS-4000. This is a continuation of the WA76, WA91 and NA12/2 experiments which performed a dedicated search for non-qqbar mesons in centrally produced exclusive events.

The aim of experiment WA102 is to make a more complete study of the mass region from 1.2 to 2.5 GeV using the "gluon-rich" production mechanism (DPE) and the charged particle reconstruction of the Omega Spectrometer combined with the multiphoton detection of GAMS-4000.

The experiment had a very successful first data taking run of 100 days in 1995 and collected 200 million events which are now being processed through the event reconstruction programs. 1996 will see the closure of the Omega Spectrometer and hence the last run of the experiment. For the 1996 run the setup was modified by the addition of a single threshold Cerenkov detector to allow more statistics to be gathered on the K+ K- final state.

Reference: Experiments at CERN in 1995