Strange particle production in pp collisions at √s = 0.9 and 7 TeV

Abstract

The spectra of strange hadrons are measured in proton-proton collisions, recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, at centre-of-mass energies of 0.9 and 7 TeV. The K_S⁰ , λ , and Ξ^- particles and their antiparticles are reconstructed from their decay topologies and the production rates are measured as functions of rapidity and transverse momentum, ρ T. The results are compared to other experiments and to predictions of the Pythia Monte Carlo program. The ρ T distributions are found to differ substantially from the Pythia results and the production rates exceed the predictions by up to a factor of three.