Measurement of Charged Pion Production Yields off the NuMI Target

TL;DR

This paper reports precise measurements of charged pion production yields from 120 GeV protons hitting the NuMI target, improving particle flux predictions for accelerator experiments.

Contribution

It provides detailed pion yield data across a wide momentum range, enhancing simulation accuracy for particle physics experiments.

Findings

Charged pion yields measured with 5-10% uncertainty.

Data covers momentum range 0.5 to 80 GeV/c.

Results improve particle flux modeling at Fermilab.

Abstract

The fixed-target MIPP experiment, Fermilab E907, was designed to measure the production of hadrons from the collisions of hadrons of momenta ranging from 5 to 120 GeV/c on a variety of nuclei. These data will generally improve the simulation of particle detectors and predictions of particle beam fluxes at accelerators. The spectrometer momentum resolution is between 3 and 4%, and particle identification is performed for particles ranging between 0.3 and 80 GeV/c using $dE/dx$, time-of-flight and Cherenkov radiation measurements. MIPP collected $1.42 \times10^6$ events of 120 GeV Main Injector protons striking a target used in the NuMI facility at Fermilab. The data have been analyzed and we present here charged pion yields per proton-on-target determined in bins of longitudinal and transverse momentum between 0.5 and 80 GeV/c, with combined statistical and systematic relative uncertainties between 5 and 10%.