Internship report: Brendan Lorn (Virginia Tech) - 2021
The production mechanisms of mesons can reveal various things about the nucleon
content. Mesons can be produced by a variety of exclusive reactions. These reactions can result in
light and heavy mesons as well as other particles. The purpose of the research to be conducted is
to understand the nucleon’s inner structure in term of quarks and gluons thanks to the exclusive
production of mesons. In particular, this research will be focused on the production of light mesons.
Utilizing data from an event generator, a large amount of reactions and resulting particles will be
recorded. This data will be analyzed to attempt to isolate the creation of ρ(770) mesons from other
background reactions. Utilizing cutoffs in mass, theta, and phi we see that we can recreate and
isolate ρ(770) mesons in a physical experiment using incoming virtual photons of 1 GeV 2 or higher.