Determination of the radiative decay width of the positive K*+(890) meson

A systematic study of the coherent excitation of high energy pions and kaons by nuclear targets has been completed at Fermilab (Experiment 272) with the intent of extracting the radiative decay widths of the various vector and tensor mesons. This work was initiated to furnish experimental results for comparison with theoretical predictions based on unitary symmetry schemes, quark models, and vector dominance models with the hope of shedding light on the structure of the quark-antiquark system. The work presented here deals with data collected during the second running period of E272 on the excitation of incident 200 GeV/c K+ by copper and lead targets for the purpose of precisely determining the radiative width from the transition K*+(890) → K+γ. The experiment was performed in the MIE secondary beam line of the Meson Lab utilizing an enhanced, Cherenkov tagged, positive kaon beam, a forward charged particle spectrometer consisting of drift and proportional wire chambers, and a liquid argon colorimeter for photon detection. A Primakoff type analysis of excitation in the nuclear Coulomb field including a strong contribution to the coherent production process from isoscalar exchange was applied to data for both the K+π0 and K/sub S/0π+ decay modes of the K*+