Pion production in proton collisions with light nuclei: implications for atmospheric neutrinos

Differences among calculations of the atmospheric neutrino beam can be traced in large part to differences in the representation of pion production by protons interacting with nuclei in the atmosphere. In this paper we review the existing data with the goal of determining the regions of phase space in which new measurements could help to improve the input to the calculations.Comment: latex, 13 pages, 6 figure

Analysis of nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies and Random Matrix Theory

We propose a novel statistical approach to the analysis of experimental data obtained in nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies which borrows from methods developed within the context of Random Matrix Theory. It is applied to the detection of correlations in momentum distributions of emitted particles. We find good agreement between the results obtained in this way and a standard analysis based on the method of effective mass spectra and two-pair correlation function often used in high energy physics. The method introduced here is free from unwanted background contributions.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Origin of light nuclei in near earth orbit

The possible sources of light nuclei populations observed recently below the geomagnetic cutoff by the AMS experiment are discussed in terms of nuclear processes: fragmentation of the incoming flux of cosmic helium on atmospheric nuclei, and nuclear coalescence from proton and helium induced reactions. Results of simulations for deuterium, tritium, helium 3 and 4, are presented.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure