Reaction π−p→ηn in the 15 to 40 GeV/c momentum range

Abstract A high statistics measurement of the reaction π − p → π 0 n has been performed at the Serpukhov accelerator for 15, 20, 25, 30 and 40 GeV/ c incident pion momentum using the NICE set-up with its associated 648-channel hodoscope spectrometer for γ-ray detection. More than 3 million charge-exchange events have been recorded in total. It is found that the spin-flip and non-spin-flip amplitudes can be parametrized, for small | t |, as exponentials with the same slopes to within a few percent. Also the behaviour of the differential cross section for small and medium | t | agrees with the prediction of a geometrical s -channel model which describes binary reactions in terms of a complex pole b 0 ( s ). The imaginary part of this universal pole, Im b 0 ( s ), has been determined and found to be growing logarithmically with s .