ENHANCEMENT OF CHARM SIGNAL SIGNIFICANCE IN HADROPRODUCTION

Given several sets of candidate charm decay events, where some candida tes are true decays but most are random background coincidences, it is shown that signal significance can be maximized by assigning to the c andidates in each set a weight equal to the ratio of signal to varianc e in that set. This method improves on the traditional analysis which assigns unit weight to selected candidate events and zero weight to th e others. When the sets are defined along a range of some parameter th e assigned weights constitute a smooth function of the value of the pa rameter. The technique is generalized to a multiplicity of parameters, and the utility of the method is demonstrated by application to the c harmed meson decay D-0 --> K(-)pi(+) (plus charge conjugate) signal in Fermilab Experiment E769.