Experiment 878 at the AGS
The purpose of this experiment is to investigate anti-deuteron and rare
particle production in Au-Au collisions at the AGS using the A3 line as
a beamline spectrometer. This is a follow-on proposal to our E858 program,
an investigation of anti-deuteron production in Si+Al, Si+Cu, and Si+Au
interactions, in which we also achieved high statistics measurements of
the pi-minus, K-minus, and anti-proton spectrum at zero degrees and set
new limits on the production of stable negative particles. In that
program we showed that the anti-proton yield per interaction is smaller
than expected, and that the anti-deuteron production is well below what
is predicted by a simple coalescence calculation based on the measured
anti-proton spectrum. Our goal is to further investigate the hadronization
process with a systematic study of p+A, Si+A, and Au+A collisions, to
determine the production cross section for anti-deuterons from these
systems, and to provide high statistics measurements of the pi-minus,
K-minus, anti-proton spectra at zero degrees over a broad range of
secondary momenta, 1.5GV to 12GV.