Session D7 - Hadron Physics.
ORAL session, Saturday afternoon, May 01
Governor's Square 16, Adam's Mark Hotel
Several observations of a five-quark bound system, pentaquarks, from various experiments in photon-nucleus, kaon-nucleus, and proton-proton reactions have been reported*. The presence of these states was predicted by Diakonov at al. using chiral soliton models of baryons in 1997. **
The high energies and particle densities resulting from collisions at RHIC are expected to favor pentaquark production. The large acceptance of STAR's Time Projection Chamber is ideal for such rare particle searches. The short lifetimes predicted for pentaquarks require that a mixing technique be used to reconstruct the pentaquarks via their decay products. This technique has already been used successfully by STAR to reconstruct and study short-lived resonances.
We report on the progress of the pentaquark search by the STAR collaboration in pp, dAu, and AuAu collisions through one of the decay modes, \Theta^+\rightarrow p+K^0.
*T.Nakano et al. (LEPS Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 0122002(2003) *S.Stepanyan et al. (CLAS Collaboration) hep-exp/0307018 *V.V.Barmin at al. (DIANA Collaboration) hep-exp/0304040
**D. Diakonov, V. Petrov and M. Polakov Z.Phys. A359 (1997) 305-314