Measurement of visible cross sections in proton-lead collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV in van der Meer scans with the ALICE detector

Abstract

In 2013, the Large Hadron Collid√er provided proton-lead and lead-proton collisions at the center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair sNN = 5.02 TeV . Van der Meer scans were per- formed for both configurations of colliding beams, and the cross section was measured for two reference processes, based on particle detection by the T0 and V0 detectors, with pseudo-rapidity coverage 4.6<η <4.9, −3.3<η <−3.0 and 2.8<η <5.1, −3.7<η <−1.7, respectively. Given the asymmetric detector acceptance, the cross section was measured separately for the two configurations. The measured visible cross sections are used to calculate the integrated luminosity of the proton-lead and lead-proton data samples, and to indirectly measure the cross section for a third, configuration-independent, reference process, based on neutron detection by the Zero Degree Calorimeters.