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

  • The LHCf collaboration,
  • O. Adriani,
  • E. Berti,
  • L. Bonechi,
  • M. Bongi,
  • R. D’Alessandro,
  • S. Detti,
  • M. Haguenauer,
  • Y. Itow,
  • K. Kasahara,
  • Y. Makino,
  • K. Masuda,
  • H. Menjo,
  • Y. Muraki,
  • K. Ohashi,
  • P. Papini,
  • S. Ricciarini,
  • T. Sako,
  • N. Sakurai,
  • K. Sato,
  • M. Shinoda,
  • T. Suzuki,
  • T. Tamura,
  • A. Tiberio,
  • S. Torii,
  • A. Tricomi,
  • W. C. Turner,
  • M. Ueno,
  • Q. D. Zhou

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2018)073
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2018, no. 11
pp. 1 – 26

Abstract

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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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