Large-angle production of charged pions by 3 GeV/c - 12.9 GeV/c protons on beryllium, aluminium and lead targets

Measurements of the double-differential pi(+/-) production cross-section in the range of momentum 100 MeV/c
We gratefully acknowledge the help and support of the PS beam staff and of the numerous technical collaborators who contributed to the detector design, construction, commissioning and operation. In particular, we would like to thank G. Barichello, R. Brocard, K. Burin, V. Carassiti, F. Chignoli, D. Conventi, G. Decreuse, M. Delattre, C. Detraz, A. Domeniconi, M. Dwuznik, F. Evangelisti, B. Friend, A. Iaciofano, I. Krasin, D. Lacroix, J.-C. Legrand, M. Lobello, M. Lollo, J. Loquet, F. Marinilli, J. Mulon, L. Musa, R. Nicholson, A. Pepato, P. Petev, X. Pons, I. Rusinov, M. Scandurra, E. Usenko, and R. van der Vlugt, for their support in the construction of the detector. The collaboration acknowledges the major contributions and advice of M. Baldo-Ceolin, L. Linssen, M.T. Muciaccia and A. Pullia during the construction of the experiment. The collaboration is indebted to V. Ableev, P. Arce, F. Bergsma, P. Binko, E. Boter, C. Buttar, M. Calvi, M. Campanelli, C. Cavion, A. Chukanov, A. De Min, M. Doucet, D. D¨ullmann, R. Engel, V. Ermilova,W. Flegel, P. Gruber, Y. Hayato, P. Hodgson, A. Ichikawa, A. Ivanchenko, I. Kato, O. Klimov, T. Kobayashi, D. Kustov, M. Laveder, M. Mass, H. Meinhard, T. Nakaya, K. Nishikawa, M. Paganoni, F. Paleari, M. Pasquali, J. Pasternak, C. Pattison, M. Placentino, S. Robbins, G. Santin, S. Simone, A. Tornero, S. Troquereau, S. Ueda, A. Valassi, F. Vannucci and K. Zuber for their contributions to the experiment and to P. Dini for his contribution to MC production. We acknowledge the contributions of V. Ammosov, G. Chelkov, D. Dedovich, F. Dydak, M. Gostkin, A. Guskov, D. Khartchenko, V. Koreshev, Z. Kroumchtein, I. Nefedov, A. Semak, J. Wotschack, V. Zaets and A. Zhemchugov to the work described in this paper. The experiment was made possible by grants from the Institut Interuniversitaire des Sciences Nucl´eaires and the Interuniversitair Instituut voor Kernwetenschappen (Belgium), Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia, Grant FPA2003-06921-c02-02 and Generalitat Valenciana, grant GV00-054-1, CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), the German Bundesministerium f¨ur Bildung und Forschung (Germany), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), INR RAS (Moscow) and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (UK). We gratefully acknowledge their support. This work was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in the framework of the programme SCOPES - Scientific co-operation between Eastern Europe and Switzerland.