Physics projects of COMPASS with hadron beams

COMPASS, a new state-of-the-art spectrometer to be installed at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron for experiments with muon and hadron beams, will be exposed to hadron beams with intensities up to 10/sup 8//sec and energies up to 280 GeV. The physics goals are to study the rare production of charmed hadrons, including doubly charmed baryons, in inelastic interactions, with particular interest in their semileptonic decays; to search for glueballs and hybrids in central and diffractive production. Predictions of chiral perturbation theory will be tested in Primakoff reactions. The spectrometer shall be equipped with excellent particle identification and tracking, with calorimetry, dedicated triggers and fast read-out. A significant improvement of light hadron spectroscopy - compared to previous measurements -can be achieved already in the initial phase of the experiment. (4 refs).