Hadron spectroscopy

HQET provides a wealth of predictions concerning the spins and decay patterns of charmed mesons and charmed baryons. Both will be copiously produced in CLEO III. Precision measurements of mass differences[49] may be used to determine the decay constant [50]. Presently the mass difference errors are of the order of 0.1 MeV/c. The CLEO III data sample of such decays should be more than an order of magnitude larger than that shown in Fig. which comes from CLEO II.

CLEO III will thus provide the opportunity to measure the branching fractions, identify the excited states, and unravel the complexities of the weak decays of the , , , , and mesons. This program for the and , which took approximately 15 years, is only now nearing completion.

The study of excited vector states (e.g., ) usually means fitting decay angular distributions, and hence requires an extremely large data sample. Such studies will be possible in CLEO III providing an opportunity to make stringent tests of QCD models of the spectroscopy of mesons containing one heavy quark.

Spectroscopy has historically yielded surprises and the high statistics data sample of CLEO III will make it an ideal place to search for bound states, glueballs, and other exotica.