Office:2031 NPB
352.392.8475

yelton@phys.ufl.edu








































John Yelton

Professor and Associate Chair


Education

PhD University of Oxford, England (1981)

Research Group

Institute for High Energy Physics and Astrophysics

Research Interests

Research interests include the CLEO collaboration, working at the Cornell Electron Storage Rings, since 1988. The CLEO detector is particularly good at looking at the decays of B mesons, but his particular specialty has been the spectroscopy and study of charmed particles, in particular baryons containing charmed quarks. Charmed baryons come in many varieties, each being rather like an excitation of a hydrogen atom which we learn about in atomic physics. By finding new states and studying their decays we learn about the way baryons are put together. In the last decade, CLEO has been in the forefront of this research, and we have discovered around a dozen new states, each one corresponding to a different configuration of quarks. These analyses are performed using the superb computer resources we have at the Department of Physics. Most of the charmed baryons produced at CLEO are from the reaction positron + electron becomes charmed baryons can also be made as the decay products of B mesons (mesons containing a b, or bottom, quark). The group is also studying the mechanisms for B mesons decaying to charmed mesons plus non-charmed baryons. This line of research is another piece in the jigsaw we need to completely understand B meson decay - a challenging topic with wide-reaching consequences.

Selected Publications

Alexander J, et al. "Evidence of New States Decaying into Xi(c)* pi", PRL 83 3390 (1999).

Brandeberg G, et al. "Observation of Two Excited States Decaying into Lambda(c) pi", PRL 78 2304 (1997).

Alam M, et al. "Measurement of the Branching Fractions of Lambda(c) to p (anti-)K n(pi)",Phys. Rev. D57 4467 (1998).

Gibbons L, et al. "Observation of an Excited Charmed Baryon Decaying into Xi(c)0 pi", PRL 77 810 (1996).

Avery P, et al. "Observation of a Narrow State Decaying into Xi(c)pi+", PRL 75 4364 (1995).