Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Physics and Astronomy

Sub-Department

College of Arts and Sciences

First Advisor

Yordanka Ilieva

Abstract

The spectrum of the excited nucleon (N*) states provides key information on the relevant degrees of freedom within the nucleon. The determination of the N* spectrum requires an extensive set of high–quality experimental observables for a large number of nuclear reactions over a broad kinematic range. In particular, measurements of polarization observables of strangeness photoproduction are of high importance as many of the resonances that are predicted by quark models, but not observed in pion– nucleon channels, are expected to couple strongly to kaon–hyperon (KY) channels. While in the last decade a large body of polarization and cross–section data has been published for strangeness photoproduction off the proton, data off the neutron are very scarce. The goal of this dissertation is to determine the polarization observables Cx, Cz, and P in the reaction yd -> K0 ^(p), where the deuteron is used as a neutron target. The data was collected in the experiment E06-103 with the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) using a circularly-polarized photon beam and an unpolarized LD2 target. In this thesis I discuss the analysis technique and show results of Cx, Cz, and P for quasi–free photoproduction of K0^ off the bound neutron for photon energies between 0.9–2.6 GeV and K0 center–of–mass angles, cos CM K0 , between −1 and 1. This study is part of a larger program carried out at JLab to provide a nearly complete set of observables for strangeness photoproduction off the nucleon.

Rights

© 2017, Colin Gleason

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