Measurement of the η production in proton-proton collisions with the COSY time-of-flight spectrometer

The reaction pp → ppη was measured at excess energies of 15 and 41 MeV at an external target of the Jülich Cooler Synchrotron COSY with the time-of-flight spectrometer. About 25000 events were measured for the excess energy of 15 MeV and about 8000 for 41 MeV. Both protons of the process ppη were detected with an acceptance of nearly 100% and the η was reconstructed by the missing-mass technique. For both excess energies the angular distributions are found to be nearly isotropic. In the invariant-mass distributions strong deviations from the pure phase space distributions are seen. © Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag 2003.