Helicity Analysis of Semileptonic Hyperon Decays Including Lepton Mass Effects

Using the helicity method we derive complete formulas for the joint angular decay distributions occurring in semileptonic hyperon decays including lepton mass and polarization effects. Compared to the traditional covariant calculation the helicity method allows one to organize the calculation of the angular decay distributions in a very compact and efficient way. In the helicity method the angular analysis is of cascade type, i.e. each decay in the decay chain is analyzed in the respective rest system of that particle. Such an approach is ideally suited as input for a Monte Carlo event generation program. As a specific example we take the decay $\Xi^0 \to \Sigma^+ + l^- + \bar{\nu}_l$ ($l^-=e^-, \mu^-$) followed by the nonleptonic decay $\Sigma^+ \to p + \pi^0$ for which we show a few examples of decay distributions which are generated from a Monte Carlo program based on the formulas presented in this paper. All the results of this paper are also applicable to the semileptonic and nonleptonic decays of ground state charm and bottom baryons, and to the decays of the top quark.Comment: Published version. 40 pages, 11 figures included in the text. Typos corrected, comments added, references added and update

Calculation of the Flux of Atmospheric Neutrinos

Atmospheric neutrino-fluxes are calculated over the wide energy range from 30 MeV to 3,000 GeV for the study of neutrino-physics using the data from underground neutrino-detectors. The atmospheric muon-flux at high altitude and at sea level is studied to calibrate the neutrino-fluxes at low energies and high energies respectively. The agreement of our calculation with observations is satisfactory. The uncertainty of atmospheric neutrino-fluxes is also studied.Comment: 51 page

Measurement of weak meson form factors in spacelike regions

With the construction of high energy, high intensity accelerators (NAL & CERN, SPS) investigation of neutrino scattering on virtual pions, a la Chew-Low, becomes experimentally possible. The process nu +N to mu /sup -/+K+ Delta is analysed to extract the usual K/sub l3/ form factor(s) for spacelike momentum transfer. A model calculation suggests that f/sub +/(T) can be determined reasonably well from a triple differential cross section, whereas only rough information on f /sub -/(T) may be obtained from the transverse polarization of the muon. The experiment proposed requires scanning of several millions of bubble chamber pictures. (14 refs)