DOE OSTI2015
Photoproduction of mesons from the nucleon has a long and ongoing tradition for exploring nucleon excitations and the baryon-baryon interaction. Polarization observables which play a role in the photoproduction mechanism are, therefore, essential in addition to the differential cross section. The CLAS collaboration at Jefferson Lab, has been active in measuring these observables, but until now only on a proton targets. However, a comprehensive picture of the pseudoscalar meson photoproduction requires neutron data as well. That is, paired measurements of observables in p and n reactions are necessary to disentangle the photoproduction mechanism on the basis of isospin I = 0, and I = 1 photo-coupling transition amplitudes. The g14 experiment with 'HDIce,' a longitudinally polarized solid target of molecular hydrogen-deuteride with low background contamination from other nuclear species, provided an unique opportunity to measure several polarization observables|for the first time|on the neutron for different channels. In particular, we present our measurements of the E beam-target polarization observable, which requires circularly polarized beam and a longitudinally polarized target, for p pi^-, K^0Lambda, and K^0Sigma^0 channels in the energy range of 1.5 lte W lte 2.3 GeV. In addition, we also utilized the g14 dataset to investigate the intrinsic spin of a possible dibaryonic ND bound state by measuring the E (beam-target) observable on the d-pi^+/-d channel of the reaction yd --> pi^+pi^-d(0). Finally, this thesis also discusses a highly efficient multivariate analysis method called Boosted Decision Trees, which we employed extensively for this work and which has not been used before in CLAS data analysis.