Baryon spectroscopy in COMPASS

COMPASS is a fixed-target experiment at CERN SPS which investigates the structure and spectroscopy of hadrons. During in total 9 weeks in 2008 and 2009, a 190 GeV/c proton beam impinging on a liquid hydrogen target has been used primarily to study the production of exotic mesons and glueball candidates at central rapidities. As no bias on the rapidity was introduced by the trigger system, the data also yield the unique possibility to study diffractive dissociation of the beam proton while an inert target is assumed. To this end exclusive events with three charged particles including one proton in the final state have been extracted. We report on the status of the event selection studies and discuss the prospect of using partial wave analysis techniques, which have been successfully applied for diffractive dissociation reactions of pions in COMPASS.