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The goal of this project was to simulate a small scale experiment in meson spectroscopy involving the photo-production of strange mesons according to: . The decay channels selected for study consisted of the final state topologies: and where the brackets denote a particle is allowed to go undetected. The theory behind the process predicts that when the 9 GeV photon is incident on the target proton (quark content udu), there is a resulting pair production and exchange of a strange quark and anti-quark. This interaction results in the formation of a recoil baryon (uds), and an (unobserved) excited Kaon system ( us(bar) ). These systems then decay and the products of these decays are used to study the physics of the interaction. In order to accomplish this task, a Monte Carlo simulation program was employed to generate phase space events corresponding to the end state topologies produced via the subsequent decays of these two systems. The resulting 1,003,648 simulated events consisting solely of particle 4-vectors which were then processed by a number of different software utilities to further simulate the effects of propagation through and interaction with the virtual detector array; as well as to introduce additional background events which are an inevitable consequence of any real experimental setup. The resultant fully processed events were then reconstructed and processed by an analysis software program, employing a unique analysis plugin written specifically for this project, currently under development for use in the GlueX experiment being conducted at Jefferson Labs in Virginia. The acceptances that resulted from the above procedures were found to initially be 7.25% for the 5 particle state and 26.93% for the missing state, which is consistent with current estimates. However the subsequent kinematic fitting reduced these values to 1.27% and 4.59%, respectively, indicating there is still an issue in this part of the software. Once the acceptances had been generated, the phase spaces of both reactions were fully mapped out by means of invariant mass spectra.
