Forward production of J//psi/ in hadronic interactions and calibration of a large BGO electromagnetic calorimeter

In the first part of this thesis, we describe an analysis of J//psi/ produced in the forward direction in the reaction πN → μ+μ/sup /minus//X. The data for this analysis were collected by Fermilab experiment E615. We measured the cross section for J//psi/ production and the angular distribution of muons from J//psi/ decay. We found evidence for longitudinal polarization of J//psi/ produced in the kinematic limit where the J//psi/ carries a large fraction of the incident pion's longitudinal momentum. This is the first experimental observation of longitudinal polarization of J//psi/ produced in hadronic interactions. In the second part of this thesis, we describe the construction and calibration of a large Bismuth Germanante (BGO) electromagnetic calorimeter designed to study e+e/sup /minus// collisions at center-of-mass energies near the Z0 mass. The calorimeter is a subdetector of the L3 detector and will be installed in the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research. We present the results of a calibration of the calorimeter in an electron test beam at electron energies of 2, 10, and 50 GeV. We show that the accuracy of the calibration is 0.8% at 2 GeV, improving to better than 0.5% at 10 GeV and above. 65 refs., 72 figs., 21 tabs