Abstract
This Letter presents a measurement of the inelastic proton-proton cross section using of collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Inelastic interactions are selected using rings of plastic scintillators in the forward region () of the detector. A cross section of is measured in the fiducial region , where is the larger invariant mass of the two hadronic systems separated by the largest rapidity gap in the event. In this range the scintillators are highly efficient. For diffractive events this corresponds to cases where at least one proton dissociates to a system with . The measured cross section is compared with a range of theoretical predictions. When extrapolated to the full phase space, a cross section of is measured, consistent with the inelastic cross section increasing with center-of-mass energy.
- Received 9 June 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.182002
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
© 2016 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration