Study of the decay $D^0\to K^{-}{K}^{-}{K}^{+}{\pi }^{+}$

Abstract

Using data from the E791 fixed-target hadroproduction experiment at Fermilab we have studied the Cabibbo-favored but phase-space suppressed decay, $D^0\to K^{-}{K}^{-}{K}^{+}{\pi }^{+}$. We find the decay rate for this mode to be $(0.54\pm 0.16\pm 0.08)\times 10^{-2}$ times that for the normalization mode $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}$. We observe a clear signal for $D^0\to \varphi K^{-}{\pi }^{+}$ which is consistent with producing $0.7\pm 0.3$ of the $D^0\to K^{-}{K}^{-}{K}^{+}{\pi }^{+}$ signal. In the context of simple models, we use our measurements to estimate the importance of decay amplitudes that produce extra quark-antiquark pairs from the vacuum relative to those that do not.

20 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Study of the decay mode D^0 -> K-K-K+pi+