Speaker
Description
While the excitation spectrum of light mesons, which are composed of up and down quarks, is already mapped out fairly well, the spectrum of strange mesons is still to be mapped out in detail, potentially holding many surprise.
At the COMPASS experiment at CERN, we study the strange-meson spectrum in the diffractive scattering of a high-energy kaon beam.
In this talk we will focus on the $K^-\pi^-\pi^+$ final state, for which COMPASS has acquired the world's largest data set to date.
Based on this data set, we have performed a partial-wave analysis to disentangle the produced mesons by their spin-parity quantum numbers and to measure their masses and widths.
We will report on recent results from this analysis, including the first candidate for a crypto-exotic strange meson with $J^P=0^-$.