The dilepton spectrometer

The dilepton spectrometer (DLS) at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Bevalac has been designed and constructed to investigate the production of electron-positron pairs with low mass and low transverse momentum in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions for incident-beam kinetic energies of 5 A GeV and less. This article briefly recalls the physics objectives of the program, discusses the methodology of the measurement, presents details of the design of the spectrometer and the detector elements, and reports on their performance. Selected experimental results are given to illustrate the capability of the DLS and to demonstrate the level to which it is possible to realize the physics objectives with the spectrometer.