Journal of High Energy Physics (Nov 2018)
Measurement of inclusive forward neutron production cross section in proton-proton collisions at s = 13 $$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ TeV with the LHCf Arm2 detector
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, we report the measurement relative to the production of forward neutrons in proton-proton collisions at s = 13 $$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$ TeV obtained using the LHCf Arm2 detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The results for the inclusive differential production cross section are presented as a function of energy in three different pseudorapidity regions: η > 10.76, 8.99 10.76, no model is able to reproduce the observed peak structure at around 5 TeV and all models underestimate the total production cross section: among them, QGSJET II-04 shows the smallest deficit with respect to data for the whole energy range. For 8.99 < η < 9.22 and 8.81 < η < 8.99, the models having the best overall agreement with data are SIBYLL 2.3 and EPOS-LHC, respectively: in particular, in both regions SIBYLL 2.3 is able to reproduce the observed peak structure at around 1.5–2.5 TeV.
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