An experiment using the Fermilab Single Arm Spectrometer (SAS) facility and an associated nonmagnetic vertex detector studied the reactions a+p→c+X, where a and c were π±, K±, p, or p¯. Extensive measurements were made at 100 and 175 GeV/c beam momenta with the outgoing hadrons detected in the SAS covering a kinematic range 0.12<x<1.0 and pT<1.25 GeV/c. Additional data covering a more restricted range in x were also gathered at 70 GeV/c incident momentum. In this high-statistics experiment, the identification of both the incoming and outgoing charged hadrons were made with a total of eight Čerenkov counters. New and extensive single-particle inclusive data for charged-particle production in low-pT hadronic fragmentation are presented. The average associated charged-particle multiplicity and pseudorapidity distributions are also given.
The charged-particle multiplicity distribution from 250-GeV/c π−p interactions in the Fermilab 15-ft bubble chamber is presented. The corrections to the raw data are described. Fits to these data along with other high-energy bubble-chamber data show that cluster models with two components—a low-multiplicity, diffractive component and a high-multiplicity, nondiffractive component—describe the data fairly well. The charged multiplicity of each cluster is found to be ∼2, while the number of clusters for each component grows linearly with ln(s). The multiplicity moments are consistent with other experiments. We find 〈nc〉=8.427±0.059, f2cc=8.66±0.11, 〈nc〉D=2.038±0.023. The total inelastic cross section is σI=21.42±0.50 mb.