Inelastic proton-proton cross section measurements in CMS at sqrt(s)=7 TeV

Abstract

We present measurements of the total inelastic pp cross section at 7 TeV obtained with the CMS detector. Two different methods are used. In runs with low event pile-up, we exploit the large pseudorapidity coverage (|\eta|<5.2) of the CMS calorimeters to obtain the cross section for events with any activity in the acceptance range. In addition, runs with high event pile-up are used by fitting a Poisson distribution with the total visible cross section as parameter to the number of reconstructed primary vertices. Both measurements are corrected to a hadron level definition of the inelastic cross section.