Measurement of identified charged hadron spectra in proton-proton collisions using the Inner Tracking System of the ALICE experiment at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reports on the measurement of charged hadron spectra in proton-proton collisions at 900 GeV using the ALICE detector's Inner Tracking System, focusing on low momentum particles and comparing different detection methods.

Contribution

It introduces a stand-alone ITS method for particle identification and compares it with combined ITS and TPC methods in measuring hadron spectra.

Findings

Successful detection of low p_t charged hadrons below 200 MeV/c.

Comparison of ITS and TPC/TOF methods for particle identification.

Extraction of mean p_t values from the spectra.

Abstract

The measurement of the identified charged hadron p_t spectra using the ITS energy loss signal in the p-p data at sqrt{s}=900 GeV collected by the ALICE experiment at LHC will be discussed. It is performed using the Inner Tracking System (ITS) in stand-alone mode, both for track reconstruction and particle identification, allowing one to detect low momentum particles with p_t below 200 MeV/c. A second method using the tracks reconstructed by both the ITS and the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) has also been developed. The obtained results will be compared with the ones obtained from the TPC and from the Time Of Flight detector and used to extract the mean p_t value.