Interactions of Kaons, Other Hadrons, and Electrons

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***9803848EckhauseThe William and Mary group, in conjunction with collaborators from UCIrvine, UTAustin, Stanford U, and Richmond U, plans to continue its program of searching at high sensitivity for the rare dilepton decays of the long-lived neutral K meson. These include the lepton-nonconserving decay to a muon and an electron, and the flavor-changing neutral current decays to a muon-antimuon pair and to an electron-positron pair. This work, Experiment E871, is carried out at the AGS Facility of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The objective of single-event sensitivity at a level of one-to-two parts in a thousand billion appears within reach based upon available data. An extensive analysis now in progress has revealed the first observation of di-electron events. Using the E871 detector a separate experiment E935 has also been run by UCIrvine, Richmond U, and William and Mary which attempts to probe for evidence of a low mass gluon. Specifically a search is made for the decay of a long-lived gluon-gluino hadron to a pair of charged pions and a photino. Limits can then be placed on a low mass gaugino scenario of supersymmetric particle theory. Within the past five years three William and Mary graduate students have written their Ph.D. dissertations based on this work. In addition this program has led to seven undergraduate senior honors research theses. This commitment to education by the William and Mary group at both the undergraduate and graduate levels will continue in the future. ***