Pseudorapidity distribution of charged particles in collisions at GeV

Using a silicon vertex detector, we measure the charged particle pseudorapidity distribution over the range 1.5 to 5.5 using data collected from collisions at GeV. With a data sample of 3 × 106 events, we deduce a result with an overall normalization uncertainty of 5%, and typical bin to bin errors of a few percent. We compare our result to the measurement of UA5, and the distribution generated by the Lund Monte Carlo with default settings. This is only the second measurement at this level of precision, and only the second measurement for pseudorapidity greater than 3.