https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-7675-6
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Measurement of 
meson production in 
interactions at 40, 80 and 
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
University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
7
Wigner Research Centre for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
8
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
9
Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Kielce, Poland
10
Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków, Poland
11
National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland
12
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
13
AGH - University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland
14
University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
15
University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
16
University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland
17
Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
18
Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow, Russia
19
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
20
Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, National Research Nuclear University, Moscow, Russia
21
St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia
22
University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
23
University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
24
Fermilab, Batavia, USA
25
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
26
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
* e-mail: antoni.marcinek@ifj.edu.pl
Received:
17
August
2019
Accepted:
27
January
2020
Published online:
3
March
2020
Results on meson production in inelastic collisions at CERN SPS energies are presented. They are derived from data collected by the NA61/SHINE fixed target experiment, by means of invariant mass spectra fits in the 
decay channel. They include the first ever measured double differential spectra of mesons as a function of rapidity 
and transverse momentum 
for proton beam momenta of 
and , as well as single differential spectra of or for beam momentum of 
. The corresponding total yields per inelastic event are obtained. These results are compared with existing data on meson production in collisions. The comparison shows consistency but superior accuracy of the present measurements. The emission of mesons in reactions is confronted with that occurring in 
collisions, and the experimental results are compared with model predictions. It appears that none of the considered models can properly describe all the experimental observations.
© The Author(s), 2020
