Measurements of Hadron Production in Pion-Carbon Interactions with NA61/SHINE at the CERN SPS

TL;DR

This paper reports measurements of hadron production in pion-carbon interactions at CERN SPS, providing data crucial for improving air shower models and interpreting ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray observations.

Contribution

It presents new experimental spectra of identified hadrons, (anti)baryons, and resonances in pion-carbon collisions at 158 and 350 GeV/c, enhancing hadronic interaction models.

Findings

Preliminary spectra of $K^{b}$ and $p$($ar{p}$) are shown.

Comparison with hadronic interaction models used in air shower simulations.

Final results on $ ho^0$, $$, and $K^{0*}$ resonance production.

Abstract

NA61/SHINE is a fixed target experiment designed to study hadron-proton, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus interactions at the CERN Super-Proton-Synchrotron. In this proceeding we present results on spectra of identified hadrons produced in pion-carbon production interactions, which are of fundamental importance to improve the extensive air shower modeling, and hence the interpretation of ultra-high-energy-cosmic-rays measurements. In particular, our measurements of (anti)baryons and $\rho^0$ production in pion-carbon interactions can contribute to improve the predictions of muon production by air shower simulations using hadronic interaction models. In this contribution we discuss the data analysis and the results from pion-carbon collisions recorded at beam momenta of 158 and 350 GeV/c. The preliminary spectra of $K^{\pm}$ and $p$($\bar{p}$) are shown, as well as a comparison to predictions of hadronic interaction models used in air shower simulations. Additionally, we present final results on the production of $\rho^0$, $\omega$ and $K^{0*}$ resonances.