New results on the production of charged pions in p+p interactions are presented. The data come from a sample of 4.8 million inelastic events obtained with the NA49 detector at the CERN SPS at 158 GeV/c beam momentum. Pions are identified by energy loss measurement in a large TPC tracking system which covers a major fraction of the production phase space. Inclusive invariant cross sections are given on a grid of nearly 300 bins per charge over intervals from 0 to 2 GeV/c in transverse momentum and from 0 to 0.85 in Feynman x. The results are compared to existing data in overlapping energy ranges.
We report on measurements of charged pion production cross sections at θ ≅ 50°, p T ≅ 3–9 GeV / c and √ s = 45 GeV , taken with the Split Field Magnet Detector at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR). Together with previous data at √ s = 62 GeV , this allows the calculation of the exponent n assuming a power law dependence p n T . Values of n ≈ 8 are found at low x T = 2 p T /√ s which drop to about 7 at x T ≈ 0.3. The measured values of π + /π − rise with x T and approach ≈ 2 at x T ≈ 0.3. A first-order QCD calculations is reasonably consistent with the data.