Measurement of di-muons from 400 GeV/c protons interacting in a thick molybdenum/tungsten target

Abstract

Di-muon events emanating from a replica of the SHiP target at the CERN SPS (with a 400 GeV/c proton beam) contain a clear signal of \jpsi production. The target consisted of 13 interaction lengths of molybdenum and tungsten, followed by a 2.4m iron hadron absorber. The di-muon rate is in reasonable agreement with \MC based on Pythia v8. However, the $J/\psi$ rate observed in the data is much lower than predicted by the Monte Carlo simulation, which is advantageous for SHiP since muons with a large $p_T$ are more difficult to deflect by the active muon shield. For the center of mass rapidity ($y_{\rm cm}$) interval with the largest overlap with the NA50 measurement, $0.3 < y_{\rm cm} < 0.6$, we obtain the production cross-section per nucleon $\sigma(J/\psi)/A$ including the branching ratios of $J/\psi$ decays into muons, $B_{\mu^+\mu^-}$: $B_{\mu^+\mu^-}\sigma(J/\psi)/A=(1.18~\pm~0.04~\pm~0.10)~\mathrm{nb}$/nucleon. This is to be compared to the NA50 extrapolated result (using a much thinner target): $B_{\mu^+\mu^-}\sigma(J/\psi)/A=(0.99~\pm~0.04)~\mathrm{nb}$/nucleon. Within the systematic errors, no significant enhancement due to secondary production of \jpsi inside the target is observed. An upper limit at 90\% confidence level of possible contributions from secondary collisions of $<32\%$ is obtained.