Eur. Phys. J. C (2016) 76: 84
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-3898-y

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Measurements of , , , and proton production in proton–carbon interactions at 31 GeV/c with the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN SPS

¹ National Nuclear Research Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
² Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
³ Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
⁴ LPNHE, University of Paris VI and VII, Paris, France
⁵ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
⁶ Fachhochschule Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
⁷ University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
⁸ University of Athens, Athens, Greece
⁹ Wigner Research Centre for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
¹⁰ Institute for Particle and Nuclear Studies, KEK, Tsukuba, Japan
¹¹ University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
¹² Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow, Russia
¹³ Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
¹⁴ St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia
¹⁵ University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
¹⁶ ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
¹⁷ University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
¹⁸ University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
¹⁹ Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce, Poland
²⁰ National Center for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland
²¹ Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
²² University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
²³ Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
²⁴ University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland
²⁵ Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
²⁶ National Research Nuclear University “MEPhI” (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute), Moscow, Russia
²⁷ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, USA
²⁸ University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
²⁹ University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
³⁰ Department of Physics, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

^* e-mail: Boris.Popov@cern.ch

Received: 12 October 2015
Accepted: 14 January 2016
Published online: 18 February 2016

Abstract

Measurements of hadron production in p + C interactions at 31 GeV/c are performed using the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN SPS. The analysis is based on the full set of data collected in 2009 using a graphite target with a thickness of 4 % of a nuclear interaction length. Inelastic and production cross sections as well as spectra of , , p, and are measured with high precision. These measurements are essential for improved calculations of the initial neutrino fluxes in the T2K long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan. A comparison of the NA61/SHINE measurements with predictions of several hadroproduction models is presented.