The HARP detector at the CERN PS

HARP is a high-statistics, large solid angle experiment to measure hadron production using proton and pion beams with momenta between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c impinging on many different solid and liquid targets from low to high Z. The experiment, located in the T9 beam of the CERN PS, took data in 2001 and 2002. For the measurement of momenta of produced particles and for the identification of particle types, the experiment includes a large-angle spectrometer, based on a Time Projection Chamber and a system of Resistive Plate Chambers, and a forward spectrometer equipped with a set of large drift chambers, a threshold Cherenkov detector, a time-of-flight wall and an electromagnetic calorimeter. The large angle system uses a solenoidal magnet, while the forward spectrometer is based on a dipole magnet. Redundancy in particle identification has been sought, to enable the cross-calibration of efficiencies and to obtain a few percent overall accuracy in the cross-section measurements. Detector construction, operation and initial physics performances are reported. In addition, the full chain for data recording and analysis, from trigger to the software framework, is describe

PROPOSAL TO STUDY HELIUM INDUCED HADRON PRODUCTION FOR THE ATMOSPHERIC-NEUTRINO FLUX

CERN-SPSC-2001-016, CERN-SPSC-P-315-ADD-

The HARP detector at the CERN PS

HARP is a high-statistics, large solid angle experiment to measure hadron production using proton and pion beams with momenta between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c impinging on many different solid and liquid targets from low to high Z. The experiment, located in the T9 beam of the CERN PS, took data in 2001 and 2002. For the measurement of momenta of produced particles and for the identification of particle types, the experiment includes a large-angle spectrometer, based on a Time Projection Chamber and a system of Resistive Plate Chambers, and a forward spectrometer equipped with a set of large drift chambers, a threshold Cherenkov detector, a time-of-flight wall and an electromagnetic calorimeter. The large angle system uses a solenoidal magnet, while the forward spectrometer is based on a dipole magnet. Redundancy in particle identification has been sought, to enable the cross-calibration of efficiencies and to obtain a few percent overall accuracy in the cross-section measurements. Detector construction, operation and initial physics performances are reported. In addition, the full chain for data recording and analysis, from trigger to the software framework, is described

Measurement of the production cross-section of positive pions in p–Al collisions at 12.9 GeV/c

A precision measurement of the double-differential production cross-section, View the MathML source, for pions of positive charge, performed in the HARP experiment is presented. The incident particles are protons of 12.9 GeV/c momentum impinging on an aluminium target of 5% nuclear interaction length. The measurement of this cross-section has a direct application to the calculation of the neutrino flux of the K2K experiment. After cuts, 210 000 secondary tracks reconstructed in the forward spectrometer were used in this analysis. The results are given for secondaries within a momentum range from 0.75 to 6.5 GeV/c, and within an angular range from 30 mrad to 210 mrad. The absolute normalization was performed using prescaled beam triggers counting protons on target. The overall scale of the cross-section is known to better than 6%, while the average point-to-point error is 8.2%