On Reconstructing Ds Mesons Using the STAR Heavy Flavor Tracker

ABSTARCT The quark-gluon matter produced in RHIC collisions has high s-quark content [1]. This suggests an equally high probability of Ds mesons formation during the different decay processes. We reconstructed Ds mesons using data from earlier runs; these encompass about ten thousand events. We also investigated the significance of the reconstructed signal as well as the efficiency of the method. We studied two different decay channels (Ds → k + +k +π, Ds → φ + +π), each at displaced vertices, as a function of transverse momentum. We ran GEANT simulations to calculate the significance of the reconstructed signal up to 500 million events. We found that for the 3-body decay, the significance remains extremely low regardless of the number of events, while the 2-body yields rather good results starting fifty million events and above. These results hint that our chances of observing Ds mesons through the k + +k +π channel in a real experiment using HFT are very minute.