Production of charged pions, kaons, and protons in e^+e^- annihilations into hadrons at √s = 10.54 GeV

Abstract

Inclusive production cross sections of π^±, K^± and p/p per hadronic e^+e^- annihilation event are measured at a center-of-mass energy of 10.54 GeV, using a relatively small sample of very high quality data from the BABAR experiment at the PEP-II B-factory at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The drift chamber and Cherenkov detector provide clean samples of identified π^±, K^±, and p/p over a wide range of momenta. Since the center-of-mass energy is below the threshold to produce a BB pair, with B a bottom-quark meson, these data represent a pure e^+e^-→qq sample with four quark flavors, and are used to test QCD predictions and hadronization models. Combined with measurements at other energies, in particular at the Z^0 resonance, they also provide precise constraints on the scaling properties of the hadronization process over a wide energy range.

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