A large aperture spectrometer at Fermilab to study high mass dimuons

Abstract A large acceptance forward spectrometer located in a unique antiproton enriched beam has been used at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory by Experiment 537 to study the production of high mass muon pairs. When the beam was operated at a momentum of 125 GeV/ c , it had a flux of 1.5 × 10 7 particles per second of which 18% were antiprotons. The spectrometer was of closed geometry design and used drift chambers as the tracking elements. Operating over a relatively short period, the experiment accumulated the largest sample of antiproton-induced high mass dimuons of any experiment to date. The contamination of this data by pion-induced dimuons was less than 0.5%.