Speaker
Description
The LHC forward (LHCf) is a unique experiment designed on purpose to measure neutral particle production spectra in the forward region to provide high energy data for the tuning of the hadronic interaction models used by ground-based cosmic rays experiments, thanks to the excellent performance of this experimental apparatus, composed by two sampling calorimeters, called Arm1 and Arm2, located at about $±140$ m from the LHC interaction point 1 (IP1), at zero-degree angle.
In this talk we would like to present the data analysis strategy and preliminary results for the measurement of $\eta$ meson differential cross section as function of the Feynman $x_F$ variable , measured in p-p collisions at $\sqrt s=13$ TeV with the Arm2 detector, and compared with the predictions of four widely used hadronic interaction models. The importance of this observation is relied to the fact that the strange quark contribution is one of the parameters characterizing the different models, thus differences in this parameter induce a large discrepancy on the expected $\eta$ production cross section.
