Date Awarded

2004

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Department

Physics

Advisor

John Kane

Abstract

This dissertation describes the measurement of the decay of the long lived neutral kaon into two muons and two electrons. The measurement was performed using the data taken during experiment E871 which was performed on the B5 beamline at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The branching ratio B( K0L → mu+mu-e +e-) is sensitive to the absorptive portion of the long distance amplitude for decays of the form K0L → ℓ+ℓ- and can be used to properly extract the short distance weak interaction amplitudes from the dileptonic events.;Measurement of K0L → mu+mu-e +e- additionally allows for the exploration of the form factor for the K0L → gamma*gamma* vertex. Measurement of the K0L → mu+mu-e +e- branching fraction from the E871 data set provides a sensitive probe to distinguish between form factors arising from a chiral theory near the kaon mass, a low energy quark/QCD theory, a vector meson dominance model, models with CP violation and models which exhibit a uniform phase space.;The analysis of the data from the E871 mumu data stream observed 119 K0L → mu+mu-e +e- events on a measured background of 52 events. The K0L → mu+mu-e +e- event sample was normalized using simultaneously measured sample of 5685 K0L → mu+mu- events. The resulting branching fraction for K0L → mu+mu-e +e- was calculated to be 2.78 +/- 0.41 +/- 0.09 x 10-9 under the assumption of a chiPT form factor. The results are consistent with the world average for B( K0L → mu+mu-e +e-) and increase the total number of K0L → mu+mu-e +e- events observed world wide from 152 to 271.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-fzvr-xe97

Rights

© The Author

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