Production of and mesons up to high transverse momentum in pp collisions at 2.76 TeV

The invariant differential cross sections for inclusive and mesons at midrapidity were measured in pp collisions at  TeV for transverse momenta  GeV/c and  GeV/c , respectively, using the ALICE detector. This large range in was achieved by combining various analysis techniques and different triggers involving the electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal). In particular, a new single-cluster, shower-shape based method was developed for the identification of high- neutral pions, which exploits that the showers originating from their decay photons overlap in the EMCal. Above 4 GeV/, the measured cross sections are found to exhibit a similar power-law behavior with an exponent of about 6.3. Next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculations differ from the measured cross sections by about 30% for the , and between 30–50% for the meson, while generator-level simulations with PYTHIA 8.2 describe the data to better than 10–30%, except at  GeV/. The new data can therefore be used to further improve the theoretical description of and meson production.