Comparison of isoscalar vector meson production cross sections in proton-proton collisions

The reaction pp→ppω was investigated with the TOF spectrometer, which is an external experiment at the accelerator COSY (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany). Total as well as differential cross sections were determined at an excess energy of 93 MeV (pbeam=2950 MeV/c). Using the total cross section of (9.0±0.7±1.1) μb for the reaction pp→ppω determined here and existing data for the reaction pp→ppphi, the ratio Click to view the MathML source turns out to be significantly larger than expected by the Okubo–Zweig–Iizuka (OZI) rule. The uncertainty of this ratio is considerably smaller than in previous determinations. The differential distributions show that the ω production is still dominated by S-wave production at this excess energy, however higher partial waves clearly contribute. A comparison of the measured angular distributions for ω production to published distributions for phi production at 83 MeV shows that the data are consistent with an identical production mechanism for both vector mesons.