Hyperon photoproduction with the BGO-OD experiment

One aim of the BGO-OD experiment is the investigation of non-strange and strange hyperon photoproduction. The setup combines a large aperture forward magnetic spectrometer and a central BGO crystal calorimeter covering the polar angles up to 12 ^circle and 25 ^circle to 155 ^circle, respectively. The acceptance gap in between is covered by a segmented plastic scintillator. Since the discovery of the Λ(1405), it remains poorly described by conventional constituent quark models, and it is a candidate for having an ''exotic'' meson-baryon or ''penta-quark'' structure, similar to states recently reported in the hidden charm sector. The Λ(1405) can be produced in the reaction γ p → K⁺ Λ(1405). One decay mode is into Σ⁰π⁰, which is prohibited for the mass-overlapping Σ(1385). A similar reaction to reconstruct is γ p → K⁺ Σ⁰, which yields one less pion in the final state. BGO-OD is ideally suited to measure both reactions and preliminary results will be presented.