Backward production in pi minus plus proton goes to neutron pi plus pi minus at 8 GeV/c

This thesis reports on events of the form pi- p + npi+pi- where the neutron is produced fast and forward in the laboratory. The data were obtained in an initial exposure of 160,000 pictures in the University of Illinois - Argonne National Laboratory streamer chamber using an 8 GeV/c pion beam. The chamber was triggered by the detection of a fast forward neutral hadron interacting in an array of thick plate optical spark chambers. The dominant feature of the data is quasi two body production of npo and nfo intermediate states. The differential cross section for po production shows evidence for backward peaking near u' = O. The fO decay angular distributions appear to be consistent with the hypothesis of u channel proton exchange as the dominant production mechanism. For both np0 and nf0 production the observed cross sections are on the order of one microbarn.U of I OnlyThesi