A Partial-Wave Analysis of Centrally Produced Two-Pseudoscalar Final States in pp Reactions at COMPASS

Abstract

COMPASS is a fixed-target experiment at CERN SPS which focused on light-quark hadron spectroscopy during the data taking in 2008 and 2009. A world-leading data set was collected with a 190GeV/c hadron beam impinging on a liquid hydrogen target in order to study the central production of glueball candidates. In this report, we motivate double-Pomeron exchange as a relevant production process for mesons without valence quark content. We select a centrally produced sample from the COMPASS data set recorded with a proton beam and introduce a decomposition into partial waves. Particular attention is paid to inherent mathematical ambiguities in the amplitude analysis of two-pseudoscalar final states. Furthermore, we show a simple parametrisation for the centrally produced K+K- system which can describe the mass dependence of the fit results with sensible Breit-Wigner parameters.