Eur. Phys. J. C (2016) 76: 617
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4440-y

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Measurements of differential yields from the surface of the T2K replica target for incoming 31 GeV/c protons with the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN SPS

NA61/SHINE Collaboration

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, Tsukuba, Japan
¹¹ University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
¹² Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Kielce, Poland
¹³ National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland
¹⁴ Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
¹⁵ University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
¹⁶ University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
¹⁷ University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland
¹⁸ Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
¹⁹ Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow, Russia
²⁰ Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
²¹ National Research Nuclear University “MEPhI” (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute), Moscow, Russia
²² St. Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
²³ University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
²⁴ ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
²⁵ University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
²⁶ University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
²⁷ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, USA
²⁸ University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
²⁹ University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
³⁰ IPNL, University of Lyon, Villeurbanne, France
³¹ Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan
³² TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC, Canada
³³ Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
³⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
³⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
³⁶ Department of Physics, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

^* e-mail: alexander.korzenev@cern.ch

Received: 10 April 2016
Accepted: 12 October 2016
Published online: 9 November 2016

Abstract

Measurements of particle emission from a replica of the T2K 90 cm-long carbon target were performed in the NA61/SHINE experiment at CERN SPS, using data collected during a high-statistics run in 2009. An efficient use of the long-target measurements for neutrino flux predictions in T2K requires dedicated reconstruction and analysis techniques. Fully-corrected differential yields of -mesons from the surface of the T2K replica target for incoming 31 GeV/c protons are presented. A possible strategy to implement these results into the T2K neutrino beam predictions is discussed and the propagation of the uncertainties of these results to the final neutrino flux is performed.