Spin alignment and violation of the OZI rule in exclusive ω and ϕ production in pp collisions

Exclusive production of the isoscalar vector mesons ω and ϕ is measured with a 190 GeV/c proton beam impinging on a liquid hydrogen target. Cross section ratios are determined in three intervals of the Feynman variable xF of the fast proton. A significant violation of the OZI rule is found, confirming earlier findings. Its kinematic dependence on xF and on the invariant mass MpV of the system formed by fast proton pfast and vector meson V is discussed in terms of diffractive production of pfastV resonances in competition with central production. The measurement of the spin density matrix element ρ00 of the vector mesons in different selected reference frames provides another handle to distinguish the contributions of these two major reaction types. Again, dependences of the alignment on xF and on MpV are found. Most of the observations can be traced back to the existence of several excited baryon states contributing to ω production which are absent in the case of the ϕ meson. Removing the low-mass MpV resonant region, the OZI rule is found to be violated by a factor of eight, independently of xF

Measurement of azimuthal hadron asymmetries in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering off unpolarised nucleons

Spin-averaged asymmetries in the azimuthal distributions of positive and negative hadrons produced in deep inelastic scattering were measured using the CERN SPS longitudinally polarised muon beam at 160 GeV/c and a 6 LiD target. The amplitudes of the three azimuthal modulations cos⁡ϕh , cos⁡2ϕh and sin⁡ϕh were obtained binning the data separately in each of the relevant kinematic variables x , z or pTh and binning in a three-dimensional grid of these three variables. The amplitudes of the cos⁡ϕh and cos⁡2ϕh modulations show strong kinematic dependencies both for positive and negative hadrons