Measurement of the pi 0 electromagnetic transition form factor

Recent Results on Meson Decays from A2

Light meson decays are used to investigate topics related to fundamental aspects of particle physics. Precision measurements of meson Dalitz decays give input to theoretical evaluations of the Hadronic Light-by-Light contribution (HLbL) to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The pseudoscalar η' decays allow for studies of topics like ππ scattering lengths, effective field theories and fundamental symmetries. The A2 collaboration, using the Crystal Ball/TAPS setup at MAMI, has recently published several high precision results on transition form factors which are related to HLbL. The value obtained for the slope parameter of the π0 electromagnetic (e/m) transition form factor (TFF) is απ = 0.030 ± 0.010tot. The slope parameters for the e/m TFFs of ηγ and ωπ0 are [see formula in PDF] and [see formula in PDF], respectively. In 2014 the collaboration had a dedicated experimental campaign for the production of η' mesons. One of the main goals was to measure the dynamics of η' → ηπ0π0 with high precision. An overview of the physics cases, the experimental setup and the results are given.

Determination of the parity of the neutral pion via its four-electron decay

We present a new determination of the parity of the neutral pion via the double Dalitz decay pi0-->e+e-e+e-. Our sample, which consists of 30,511 candidate decays, was collected from KL-->pi0pi0pi0 decays in flight at the KTeV-E799 experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. We confirm the negative pi0 parity and place a limit on scalar contributions to the pi0-->e+e-e+e- decay amplitude of less than 3.3% assuming CPT conservation. The pi0gamma*gamma* form factor is well described by a momentum-dependent model with a slope parameter fit to the final state phase-space distribution. Additionally, we have measured the branching ratio of this mode to be B(pi0-->e+e-e+e-)=(3.26+/-0.18)x10(-5).