The principal investigator works in high energy or elementary particle physics on an experiment to search for extremely rare modes of decay of the positive K meson. The search is both for decays that are predicted by a very successful theory of the weak and electromagnetic interactions, and for decays that are unexpected by the theory, but that would cast light on currently unexplained phenomena such as the apparent arrangement of elementary particles into families. In terms of experimental techniques, the current work involves the measurement of the energy of particles by a techniques known as calorimetry, the detection of photons in the energy range 5 - 250 MeV, high speed analogue and digital electronics, and computer simulation. A large magnetic spectrometer is being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It consists of a scintillating fiber target, drift and proportional chambers, and plastic scintillator calorimeters.
