Measurement of $\ddot{I}•(1020)$ meson production in fixed-target $\text{p}$Ne collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 68.5 GeV

Abstract

The first measurement of $\ddot{I}•(1020)$ meson production in fixed-target $p$Ne collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=68.5$ GeV is presented. The $\ddot{I}•(1020)$ mesons are reconstructed in their $K^{+}{K}^{-}$ decay in a data sample consisting of proton collisions on neon nuclei at rest, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $21.7\pm 1.4$ nb${}^{-1}$, collected by the LHCb detector at CERN. The $\ddot{I}•(1020)$ production cross-section in the centre-of-mass rapidity range of $-1.8<y^{\ast }<0$ and transverse momentum range of $800<p_T<6500$ MeV/c is found to be $\ddot{I}ƒ=182.7\pm 2.7\text{(stat.)}\pm 14.1\text{(syst)}\hat{I}¼$b/nucleon. A double-differential measurement of the cross-section is also provided in four regions of rapidity and six regions of transverse momentum of the $\ddot{I}•(1020)$ meson and compared with the predictions from Pythia and EPOS4, which are found to underestimate the experimental values.

All figures and tables, along with machine-readable versions and any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://lbfence.cern.ch/alcm/public/analysis/full-details/3673 (LHCb public pages)