Antiproton Annihilations in Propane

Abstract

An experiment to study the $\overline{p}$ annihilation process at 1.05 Bev/c was performed with the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory 30-in. propane bubble chamber. It was observed that the $K$-meson production in annihilation events rises sharply with the increase in energy, namely from 4±1% for annihilations at or near "rest" to 8±1%. On the other hand, the pion multiplicity was not observed to increase appreciably with the increase of available energy. We have found a pion multiplicity of 5.0±0.2. These numbers are discussed in this paper and compared with existing models for the $\overline{p}$ annihilation process. It is pointed out that with further increase in bombarding energy different models may differ appreciably in the above quantities.