Study of particle production in hadron-nucleus interactions for neutrino experiments

The dissertation presents a study of hadron product ion in the NA61/SHINE large acceptance spectrometer at CERN SPS. The differential cross se ctions were obtained for the production of negatively charged pions, neutral Kaons, and Lam bdas from the proton-Carbon interactions at 31 GeV/c. Methods of particle yields extraction from proton Carbon interactions were developed. An analysis chain of global correction m ethod (h- method) was established for the thin carbon target and as well for T2K replica targ et and compared to the results obtained with full particle identification. The h- method permits to cover larger phase space region not otherwise accessible. In addition, a full chain of V 0 analysis was prepared to obtain neutral Kaon and Lambda results in polar angle and momentum variables (p, θ ). Results on the differential production cross sections and mean mul tiplicities in production processes for negatively charged pions (in three sets of variable s: (p, θ ), (xf, p T ), (y, p T )), neutral Kaons (in (p, θ ) and (y,p T )), and Lambdas (in (p, θ )) from proton Carbon interactions at 31 GeV/c in tabularized forms were obtained. In addition, an in clusive cross section for neutral Kaon production corrected to the whole phase space regio n was obtained: σ (K 0 S ) = 28.58 ± 1.85 (stat) ± 1.72 (sys) mb The final results obtained in this dissertation are crucial for the T2K long baseline neutrino experiment and also of value for future ne utrino oscillation experiments, which will use conventional neutrino beams, and for existing a nd future cosmic-ray physics experiments. These are pioneer measurements in this energy regio n, which is the region of the overlap of low and high energy Monte Carlo Models. No other da ta are available at this energy and for this system. For lower interaction energies, proton Carbon interactions were studied by the HARP experiment and in the past by bubble chamber a nd single-arm spectrometer experiments. A scan with a few different proton ene rgies was done by the MIPP experiment but only partial and preliminary results have been published. The importance of the presented results was shown b y the T2K collaboration. Namely, these results decreased significantly systematic error on the far-to-near ratio, which is important in the determination of the oscillation parameters. Th ese results are also of interest on their own right as pioneer measurements in this energy region .