Measurements of inclusive charged-hadron transverse-momentum and pseudorapidity distributions are presented for proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 2.36 TeV. The data were collected with the CMS detector during the LHC commissioning in December 2009. For non-single-diffractive interactions, the average charged-hadron transverse momentum is measured to be 0.46 +/- 0.01 (stat.) +/- 0.01 (syst.) GeV/c at 0.9 TeV and 0.50 +/- 0.01 (stat.) +/- 0.01 (syst.) GeV/c at 2.36 TeV, for pseudorapidities between -2.4 and +2.4. At these energies, the measured pseudorapidity densities in the central region, dN(charged)/d(eta) for |eta| < 0.5, are 3.48 +/- 0.02 (stat.) +/- 0.13 (syst.) and 4.47 +/- 0.04 (stat.) +/- 0.16 (syst.), respectively. The results at 0.9 TeV are in agreement with previous measurements and confirm the expectation of near equal hadron production in p-pbar and pp collisions. The results at 2.36 TeV represent the highest-energy measurements at a particle collider to date.
Charged-hadron transverse-momentum and pseudorapidity distributions in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV are measured with the inner tracking system of the CMS detector at the LHC. The charged-hadron yield is obtained by counting the number of reconstructed hits, hit-pairs, and fully reconstructed charged-particle tracks. The combination of the three methods gives a charged-particle multiplicity per unit of pseudorapidity, dN(charged)/d(eta), for |eta| < 0.5, of 5.78 +/- 0.01 (stat) +/- 0.23 (syst) for non-single-diffractive events, higher than predicted by commonly used models. The relative increase in charged-particle multiplicity from sqrt(s) = 0.9 to 7 TeV is 66.1% +/- 1.0% (stat) +/- 4.2% (syst). The mean transverse momentum is measured to be 0.545 +/- 0.005 (stat) +/- 0.015 (syst) GeV/c. The results are compared with similar measurements at lower energies.
A measurement of the underlying activity in scattering processes with transverse momentum scale in the GeV region is performed in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 TeV, using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. Charged hadron production is studied with reference to the direction of a leading object, either a charged particle or a set of charged particles forming a jet. Predictions of several QCD-inspired models as implemented in PYTHIA are compared, after full detector simulation, to the data. The models generally predict too little production of charged hadrons with pseudorapidity eta < 2, p_T > 0.5 GeV/c, and azimuthal direction transverse to that of the leading object.
Forum