Precision measurement of charged pion and kaon multiplicities in electron-positron annihilation at Q = 10.52 GeV

Abstract

Measurements of inclusive differential cross sections for charged pion and kaon production in e+e- annihilation have been carried out at a center-of-mass energy of √s=10.52  GeV. The measurements were performed with the Belle detector at the KEKB e+e- collider using a data sample containing 113×106 e+e-→qq̅ events, where q={u,d,s,c}. We present charge-integrated differential cross sections dσh±/dz for h±={π±,K±} as a function of the relative hadron energy z=2Eh/√s from 0.2 to 0.98. The combined statistical and systematic uncertainties for π± (K±) are 4 (4) at z∼0.6 and 15 (24) at z∼0.9. The cross sections are the first measurements of the z dependence of pion and kaon production for z 0.7 as well as the first precision cross section measurements at a center-of-mass energy far below the Z0 resonance used by the experiments at LEP and SLC.