Can We Get Deeper Inside the Pion at the LHC?

TL;DR

This paper proposes measuring leading neutron spectra at the LHC to extract pion-proton and pion-pion cross-sections with high transverse momentum jets, aiming to understand pion structure and compare it to proton structure.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract pion parton distributions from LHC data and investigates differences between pion and proton structures.

Findings

Feasibility of extracting pion parton distributions from LHC data

Potential to identify fundamental differences between pion and proton structures

Simulation results supporting the measurement approach

Abstract

We propose a measurement of leading neutrons spectra at LHC in order to extract inclusive $\pi^+ p$ and $\pi^+\pi^+$ cross-sections with high $p_T$ jets production. The cross-sections for these processes are simulated with the use of parton distributions in hadrons. In this work we estimate the possibility to extract parton distributions in the pion from the data on these cross-sections and also search for signatures of fundamental differences in the pion and proton structure.