Measurements of forward proton production with incident protons and charged pions on nuclear targets at the CERN Proton Synchroton

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. Brocard, K. Burin, V. Carassiti, F. Chignoli, D. Conventi, G. Decreuse, M. Delattre, C. Detraz, A. Domeniconi, M. Dwuznik, F. Evangelisti, B. Friend, A. Iaciofano, I. Krasin, D. Lacroix, J.-C. Legrand, M. Lobello, M. Lollo, J. Loquet, F. Marinilli, R. Mazza, J. Mulon, L. Musa, R. Nicholson, A. Pepato, P. Petev, X. Pons, I. Rusinov, M. Scandurra, E. Usenko, R. van der Vlugt, for their support in the construction of the detector and P. Dini for his contribution to Monte Carlo production. The collaboration acknowledges the major contributions and advice of M. Baldo-Ceolin, L. Linssen, M.T. Muciaccia and A. Pullia during the construction of the experiment. The collaboration is indebted to V. Ableev, F. Bergsma, P. Binko, E. Boter,M. Calvi, C. Cavion,M.Chizov, A. Chukanov, A. DeSanto, A. DeMin, M. Doucet, D. D¨ullmann, V. Ermilova, W. Flegel, Y. Hayato, A. Ichikawa, O. Klimov, T. Kobayashi, D. Kustov, M. Laveder, M. Mass, H. Meinhard, A. Menegolli, T. Nakaya, K. Nishikawa, M. Paganoni, F. Paleari, M. Pasquali, M. Placentino, V. Serdiouk, S. Simone, P.J. Soler, S. Troquereau, S. Ueda, A. Valassi and R. Veenhof for their contributions to the experiment. We acknowledge the contributions of V. Ammosov, G. Chelkov, D. Dedovich, F. Dydak, M. Gostkin, A. Guskov, D. Khartchenko, V. Koreshev, Z. Kroumchtein, I. Nefedov, A. Semak, J. Wotschack, V. Zaets and A. Zhemchugov to the work described in this paper. The experiment was made possible by grants from the Institut Interuniversitaire des Sciences Nucleaires 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 fur Bildung und Forschung (Germany), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), INR RAS (Moscow), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 08-02-00018), the Bulgarian Mational Science Fund (contract VU-F- 205/2006) and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (UK). We gratefully acknowledge their support.