a Measurement of the Mass, Full Width, and Radiative Width of the Positive B(1237) Meson

An experiment was performed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to investigate the coherent production of mesons on nuclear targets (lead and copper). The experiment used and 200 GeV/c incident meson beam and a high resolution forward spectrometer consisting of proportional and drift chambers plus a liquid argon photon calorimeter. This thesis reports the results of the process (pi)('+) + A (--->) (pi)('+) (omega) + A. The (pi)('+)(omega) spectrum was found to be dominated by the B('+)(1237) meson. A fit was performed on the line shape of the (pi)('+)(omega) mass spectrum and values of 1.271 (+OR-) 0.011 GeV and 0.232 (+OR-) 0.029 GeV were found for the mass and total width. The helicity zero decay probability of the (omega), (VBAR)F(,0)(VBAR)('2), was measured to be (VBAR)F(,0)(VBAR)('2) = 0.15 (+OR-) 0.035. The t distributions were analyzed allowing the electromagnetic and hadronic production processes to interfer. From these distributions a radiative width of 230 (+OR-) 61 was extracted.