417 RESULTS ON CHARM AND BEAUTY PRODUCTION FROM THE CERN WA 92 EXPERIMENT The Beatrice Collaboration

We give results concerning the production of charm and beauty hadrons in 1rinteractions in thin metal targets at Js = 26 GeV. In order to select events containing heavy quarks we used the combined information of the CERN n' spectrometer and of a high-resolution silicon detector that allowed direct observation of the decay vertices of short-lived hadrons. In the 20% of our data sample analysed so far we have 81 events where the decay vertices of two charmed hadrons are detected. These double-charm events, for which the purity (85%) has been estimated directly from the data, have been used to study the azimuthal-angle correlation between pairs of charmed hadrons. Results are compared with QCD predictions. The same data sample is used to search for the production of beauty particles. Preliminary indications are that the number of events found is compatible with published measurements of the beauty cross-section.