Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74: 2794
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-2794-6

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Measurement of negatively charged pion spectra in inelastic p+p interactions at 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c

NA61/SHINE Collaboration

¹ University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
² Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
³ Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
⁴ Rudjer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
⁵ University of Athens, Athens, Greece
⁶ Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
⁷ ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
⁸ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
⁹ Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
¹⁰ Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow, Russia
¹¹ Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
¹² St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia
¹³ LPNHE, University of Paris VI and VII, Paris, France
¹⁴ University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
¹⁵ KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Budapest, Hungary
¹⁶ Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Kielce, Poland
¹⁷ University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
¹⁸ University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
¹⁹ High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-0801, Japan
²⁰ University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland
²¹ University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
²² University of California, Irvine, USA
²³ National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland
²⁴ Laboratory of Astroparticle Physics, University Nova Gorica, Nova Gorica, Slovenia
²⁵ Fachhochschule Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
²⁶ University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

^* e-mail: Antoni.Aduszkiewicz@fuw.edu.pl

Received: 14 October 2013
Accepted: 21 February 2014
Published online: 15 March 2014

Abstract

We present experimental results on inclusive spectra and mean multiplicities of negatively charged pions produced in inelastic p+p interactions at incident projectile momenta of 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c ( 6.3, 7.7, 8.8, 12.3 and 17.3 GeV, respectively). The measurements were performed using the large acceptance NA61/SHINE hadron spectrometer at the CERN super proton synchrotron. Two-dimensional spectra are determined in terms of rapidity and transverse momentum. Their properties such as the width of rapidity distributions and the inverse slope parameter of transverse mass spectra are extracted and their collision energy dependences are presented. The results on inelastic p+p interactions are compared with the corresponding data on central Pb+Pb collisions measured by the NA49 experiment at the CERN SPS. The results presented in this paper are part of the NA61/SHINE ion program devoted to the study of the properties of the onset of deconfinement and search for the critical point of strongly interacting matter. They are required for interpretation of results on nucleus–nucleus and proton–nucleus collisions.