Measurement of D*+ production in charged-current neutrino interactions

During the years 1994-1997, the emulsion target of the CHORUS detector was exposed to the wide-band neutrino beam of the CERN SPS of 27 GeV average neutrino energy. In total about 100 000 charged-current neutrino interactions were located in the nuclear emulsion target and fully reconstructed. A high-statistics sample of neutrino interactions with a D0 in the final state was collected. Using the decay mode D*+›D0? + a production cross-section measurement of the D*+ in neutrino-nucleon charged-current interactions was performed. The low Q-value of the decay was used to isolate a sample of candidate events containing a positive hadron with a small pT with respect to the D0 direction. A signal of 22.1±5.5D*+ events was obtained. The D*+ production cross-section relative to the D0 production cross-section, ?(D*+)/?(D0), was estimated to be 0.38±0.09(stat)±0.05(syst). From this result, the fraction of D0's produced via the decay of a D* was deduced to be 0.63±0.17. The D*+ production cross-section relative to the ?µ charged-current interaction, ?(D*+)/?(CC), was estimated to be [1.02±0.25(stat)±0.15(syst)]%. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Brussels Instituut voor Milieubeheer Israel Science Foundation: 328/94 Grant Foundation: KRF-2003-005-C00014 Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung CERN Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare National Council for Scientific Research Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter Korean Foundation for Cancer ResearchWe gratefully acknowledge the help and support of the neutrino beam staff and of the numerous technical collaborators who contributed to the detector construction, operation, emulsion pouring, development, and scanning. The experiment has been made possible by grants from the Institut Interuniversitaire des Sciences Nucléaires and the Interuniversitair Instituut voor Kernwetenschappen (Belgium), the Israel Science Foundation (grant 328/94) and the Technion Vice President Fund for the Promotion of Research (Israel), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Germany), the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Moscow, Russia), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), the Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Japan), the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2003-005-C00014) (Republic of Korea), the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter FOM and the National Scientific Research Organization NWO (The Netherlands), and the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (Turkey). We gratefully acknowledge their support