Measurements of Six-Body Hadronic Decays of the D^0 Charmed Meson

Abstract

Using data collected by the FOCUS experiment at Fermilab, we report the discovery of the decay modes D^0 --> K- pi+ pi+ pi+ pi- pi- and D^0 --> pi+ pi+ pi+ pi- pi- pi-. With a sample of 48 +/- 10 reconstructed D^0 --> K- pi+ pi+ pi+ pi- pi- decays and 149 +/- 17 reconstructed D^0 --> pi+ pi+ pi+ pi- pi- pi- decays, we measure the following relative branching ratios: $\Gamma (D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{-})/\Gamma (D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})=(2.70\pm 0.58\pm 0.38)\times 10^{-3}$ $\Gamma (D^0\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{-})/\Gamma (D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})=(5.23\pm 0.59\pm 1.35)\times 10^{-3}$ $\Gamma (D^0\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{-})/\Gamma (D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{-})=1.93\pm 0.47\pm 0.48$ The first errors are statistical and the second are systematic. The branching fraction of the Cabibbo suppressed six-body decay mode is measured to be a factor of two higher than the branching fraction of the Cabibbo favored six-body decay mode.

To be submitted to Phys. Lett. B

References in corpus (7)

• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (in "The Review of Particle Properties" 2004)
• Cerenkov Particle Identification in FOCUS
• The Target Silicon Detector for the FOCUS Spectrometer
• Study of the Cabibbo-suppressed decay modes D0-->Pi-pi+ and D0-->K-K+
• Systematics of Large Axial Vector Meson Production in Heavy Flavor Weak Decays
• Study of Hadronic Five-Body Decays of Charmed Mesons
• Study of Hadronic Five-Body Decays of Charmed Mesons Involving $K_S^0$