Charm Hadroproduction at Fermilab E769

Abstract

E769 has just recorded on tape the interactions of 500 million pions, kaons, and protons. A Cerenkov counter and a TRD were used to tag beam particle types in both positive and negative 250 GeV/c hadron beams. Thin foil Be, Al, Cu, and W targets were used with a spectrometer including silicon microstrips to look for charm decay vertices. Preliminary results show D0 --> K- pi+ and D+ --> K- pi+ pi+ mass peaks. As the event reconstruction progresses on numerous parallel microprocessors, we intend to explore the pT, xF, A, and flavor dependence of the production of charmed mesons and baryons.