Inclusive production of charged pions in p+p collisions at 158 GeV/c beam momentum

TL;DR

This paper reports new measurements of charged pion production in proton-proton collisions at 158 GeV/c, providing detailed cross sections over a broad phase space, and compares these results with existing data.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive dataset of charged pion production at this energy with high phase space coverage and detailed binning, enhancing existing experimental data.

Findings

Measured invariant cross sections over extensive phase space.

Compared results with previous data at similar energies.

Provided detailed data for theoretical and experimental use.

Abstract

New results on the production of charged pions in p+p interactions are presented. The data come from a sample of 4.8 million inelastic events obtained with the NA49 detector at the CERN SPS at 158 GeV/c beam momentum. Pions are identified by energy loss measurement in a large TPC tracking system which covers a major fraction of the production phase space. Inclusive invariant cross sections are given on a grid of nearly 300 bins per charge over intervals from 0 to 2 GeV/c in transverse momentum and from 0 to 0.85 in Feynman x. The results are compared to existing data in overlapping energy ranges.