Eur. Phys. J. C (2007) 49: 919-945
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-006-0166-6

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Charged pion production in p+C collisions at 158 GeV/c beam momentum: Discussion

¹ Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
² Eötvös Loránt University, Budapest, Hungary
³ Polish Academy of Sciences, The H. Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Cracow, Poland
⁴ CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
⁵ Oxford University, Oxford, UK
⁶ Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
⁷ Atomic Physics Department, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria

^* e-mail: Hans.Gerhard.Fischer@cern.ch

Received: 14 June 2006
Revised: 25 October 2006
Published online: 27 January 2007

Abstract

The new data on pion production in p+C interactions from the NA49 experiment at the CERN SPS are used for a detailed study of hadronization in the collision of protons with light nuclei. The comparison to the extensive set of data from p+p collisions obtained with the same detector allows for the separation and extraction of the projectile and target contributions to the pion yield both in longitudinal and in transverse momentum.