Pion Production Cross-section Measurements in p+C Collisions at the CERN SPS for Understanding Extensive Air Showers

摘要

An important approach to studying high-energy cosmic rays is theinvestigation of the properties of extensive air showers; however, the lateraldistribution of particles in simulations of such showers strongly depends onthe applied model of low-energy hadronic interactions. It has been shown thatmany constraints to be applied to these models can be obtained by studyingidentified-particle spectra from accelerator collisions, in the energy range ofthe CERN Super Proton Synchrotron. Here we present measurements of the pionproduction cross-section obtained by the NA61/SHINE experiment at the SPS, inproton-carbon collisions at the beam energy of 31 GeV from the year 2007.Further analyses of identified-particle yields in SHINE, in particular with apion beam, are in preparation.