Speaker
Description
Short lived hadronic resonances are very useful tools to probe the evolution of high energy heavy-ion collisions. Owing to the short lifetime of resonances $(\sim 10^{-23}$s), their characteristic properties such as mass, width and yield are very sensitive to the collision dynamics and in-medium effects. Multiple resonances have been studied in ALICE, including $\rho(770)$, $K^{*}(892)$, $\phi(1020)$, $\Lambda(1520)$ . However there are higher excited state resonances like $K^{*}(1430)$ and $K_2(1770)$ which have not yet been studied in the experiment because of their low production rate and difficulties in separating them cleanly from the underlying correlated background. Recent high statistics data in pp collisions collected by ALICE allow us to study the higher excited kaon state $K^{*}(1430)$. The lifetime of the $K^{*}(1430)$ ($\sim$1.5 fm$\thinspace /c$) is smaller than that of $K^{*}(892)$ ($\sim$4 fm$\thinspace /c$), it is expected that $K^{*}(1430)$ will be affected more by re-scattering in the late hadronic phase and hence measuring $K^{*}(1430)$ production in pp collisions will provide a baseline for similar measurements in Pb--Pb collisions.
We will present the first measurement of the $K^{*}(1430)$ meson reconstruced through its hadronic decay channel, $K^{*}(1430)\rightarrow K\pi$ at mid-rapidity ($|y| < 0.5$) in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV using the ALICE detector. Measurements of its mass, width and yields will be presented and discussed.
