Observation of an anomaly in the angular distribution of cumulative hadrons near the backward direction

The angular distributions of secondary pions, protons, and deuterons originating from π−Pb interactions at an incident-pion momentum of 5 GeV/c was determined in a new run of measurements relying on track reconstruction. While showing a decrease over a large angular interval with increasing emission angle, the yield of cumulative particles of each species was found to be anomalously large near the backward direction.