Measurement of the production cross-section of positive pions in p-Al collisions at 12.9-GeV/c

We gratefully acknowledge the help and support of the PS beam staff and of the numerous technical collaborators who contributed to the detector design, construction, commissioning and operation. In particular, we would like to thank G. Barichello, R. Broccard, K. Burin, V. Carassiti, F. Chignoli, G. Decreuse, C. Detraz, M. Dwuznik, F. Evangelisti, B. Friend, A. Iaciofano, I. Krasin, J.-C. Legrand, M. Lobello, F. Marinilli, J. Mulon, R. Nicholson, A. Pepato, P. Petev, X. Pons, I. Rusinov, M. Scandurra, E. Usenko, and R. van der Vlugt, for their support in the construction of the detector. The collaboration is indebted to M. Baldo Ceolin, P. Binko, E. Boter, M. Doucet, D. D¨ullmann, V. Ermilova, A. Pullia and A. Valassi for their contributions to the experiment. We are indebted to the K2K collaboration who made available their beam-line simulation for the calculation of the predicted far–to–near neutrino flux ratio. The experiment was made possible by grants from the Institut Interuniversitaire des Sciences Nucl´eaires and the Interuniversitair Instituut voor Kernwetenschappen (Belgium), Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia, Grant FPA2003-06921-c02-02 and Generalitat Valenciana, grant GV00-054-1, CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), the German Bundesministerium f¨ur Bildung und Forschung (Germany), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), INR RAS (Moscow) and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (UK). We gratefully acknowledge their support.