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

TL;DR

This paper presents detailed measurements of charged pion production in proton-carbon collisions at 158 GeV/c, providing dense coverage of the phase space and new data for understanding particle production mechanisms.

Contribution

It offers the first dense coverage of inclusive charged pion production in p+C interactions at this energy, covering a broad phase space with high granularity.

Findings

Detailed invariant cross sections across a wide phase space

First dense coverage of projectile hemisphere in p+C collisions

Data useful for modeling particle production mechanisms

Abstract

The production of charged pions in minimum bias p+C interactions is studied using a sample of 377000 inelastic events obtained with the NA49 detector at the CERN SPS at 158 GeV/c beam momentum. The data cover a phase space area ranging from 0 to 1.8 GeV/c in transverse momentum and from -0.1 to 0.5 in Feynman x. Inclusive invariant cross sections are given on a grid of 270 bins per charge thus offering for the first time a dense coverage of the projectile hemisphere and of the cross-over region into the target fragmentation zone.