Speaker
Description
The BGO-OD experiment at the ELSA accelerator facility uses an
energy tagged bremstrahlung photon beam to investigate the internal
structure of the nucleon. The setup consists of a highly segmented BGO
calorimeter surrounding the target, with a particle tracking magnetic spectrometer at forward angles.
BGO-OD is ideal for investigating the photoproduction of hadrons of
non-zero strangeness. The high momentum resolution at forward angles
covers a kinematic region where t-channel exchange mechanisms play a
dominant role. Access to this low momentum transfer region also allows
the investigation of degrees of freedom not derived from constituent quark
models, for example, the role of vector meson-baryon interactions and
dynamically generated states in photoproduction reactions.
Data taking for the first part of an extensive physics programme is
complete. Preliminary results for differential cross sections and recoil
polarisation measurements, in particular at extremely forward angles, for the photoproduction of
$K^+\Lambda$ and higher lying hyperons will be presented.
