A novel gas-based detector using large arrays of honeycomb cells has been developed and tested for use as a pre-shower photon multiplicity detector (PMD) for STAR and ALICE experiments. The appropriate cell design was arrived at using GARFIELD simulations. Prototype chambers with cell dimensions corresponding to STAR and ALICE were fabricated and tested at CERN PS and SPS. The charged particle detection efficiency and the pre-shower characteristics have been studied using pion and electron beams.

The mass of the dibaryon having spin, parityJ^π = 0⁺, isospinI = 0 and strangeness—2 is computed using chiral color dielectric model. The bare wave function is constructed as a product of two color-singlet three-quark clusters and then it is properly antisymmetrized by considering appropriate exchange operators for spin, flavor and color. Color magnetic energy due to gluon exchange, meson self energy and energy correction due to center of mass motion are computed. The calculation shows that the mass of the particle is 80 to 160 MeV less than twice λ mass.

Recent experiments indicate that a narrow baryonic state having strangeness +1 and mass of about 1540 MeV may be existing. Such a state was predicted in chiral model by Diakonovet al. In this work I compute the mass and width of this state in chiral color dielectric model. I show that the computed width is about 30 MeV. I find that the mass of the state can be fitted to the experimentally observed mass by invoking a color neutral vector field and its interaction with the quarks