A measurement of the life-time of the D meson

A preliminary measurement is presented of the lifetime of the ground state neutral charm meson, the D0. This study utilised data taken by the NA1 experiment running on the CERN SPS accelerator. A tagged photon beam was used with energies between 70 and 175Gev and the FRAMM spectrometer provided final state particle identification. The D meson production and decay points were measured with an electronically read out monolithic germanium target followed by silicon strip detectors. Charm events were identified by the reconstruction of D0 meson invariant masses where the D0 originated from a D* decay and decayed to final states containing charged kaons. A sample of 90 D0/D0 decay events was found.