Open Access

A. Acharya, H. Adhikary, K. K. Allison, Evgeny V. Andronov, Tome Antičić, Vadim A. Babkin, Mateusz Baszczyk, S. Bhosale, A. Blondel, Mariyan Bogomilov, Andrei V. Brandin, Alessandro Bravar, Wojciech Bryliński, Janusz Brzychczyk, M. Buryakov, O. Busygina, A. Bzdak, H. Cherif, M. Ćirković, Máté Csanád, J. Cybowska, T. Czopowicz, A. Damyanova, N. Davis, M. Deliyergiyev, Michael Deveaux, A. Dmitriev, W. Dominik, Piotr Dorosz, J. Dumarchez, Ralph Engel, Grigori A. Feofilov, L. Fields, Zoltán Fodor, A. Garibov, Marek Gaździcki, Oleg Golosov, V. Golovatyuk, Marina Golubeva, Katarzyna Grebieszkow, Fedor Guber, A. Haesler, Sergey N. Igolkin, Stoyanka Ilieva, Alexander Ivashkin, S. R. Johnson, Krešo Kadija, N. Kargin, E. Kashirin, Mirosław Kiełbowicz, Viktar A. Kireyeu, Viktor Klochkov, Vadim I. Kolesnikov, D. Kolev, A. Korzenev, V. N. Kovalenko, S. Kowalski, Michal Koziel, B. Kozłowski, A. Krasnoperov, Wojciech Kucewicz, M. Kuich, Alexander Kurepin, Dag Toppe Larsen, A. László, Tatiana V. Lazareva, M. Lewicki, K. Łojek, V. V. Lyubushkin, Maja Maćkowiak-Pawłowska, Zbigniew Majka, B. Maksiak, Aleksandr I. Malakhov, A. Marcinek, A. D. Marino, K. Marton, H. -J. Mathes, Tomasz Matulewicz, V. Matveev, Georgy L. Melkumov, Anastasia O. Merzlaya, B. Messerly, Łukasz Mik, Sergey Morozov, Y. Nagai, Michał Naskręt, Vitalii Ozvenchuk, V. Paolone, Oleg Petukhov, I. Pidhurskyi, Roman Płaneta, P. Podlaski, B. A. Popov, B. Porfy, M. Posiadała-Zezula, D. S. Prokhorova, Damian Pszczel, S. Puławski, Jovan Puzović, M. Ravonel, Rainer Arno Ernst Renfordt, Dieter Röhrich, E. Rondio, M. Roth, Brant T. Rumberger, M. Rumyantsev, Anar Rustamov, Maciej Rybczyński, Andrzej Rybicki, Samrangy Sadhu, Alexander Sadovsky, K. Schmidt, Ilya Selyuzhenkov, A. Yu. Seryakov, Peter Seyboth, M. Słodkowski, P. Staszel, Grzegorz Stefanek, J. Stepaniak, Michail Nikolaevič Strichanov, Herbert Ströbele, Tatjana Šuša, Arkadiy Taranenko, A. Tefelska, Dariusz Tefelski, V. Tereshchenko, Alberica Toia, R. Tsenov, L. Turko, R. Ulrich, M. Unger, Denis Uzhva, F. F. Valiev, Darko Veberič, V. V. Vechernin, A. Wickremasinghe, K. Wójcik, Oskar Wyszyński, A. Zaitsev, E. D. Zimmerman, Robert Zwaska

• The physics goal of the strong interaction program of the NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is to study the phase diagram of hadronic matter by a scan of particle production in collisions of nuclei with various sizes at a set of energies covering the SPS energy range. This paper presents differential inclusive spectra of transverse momentum, transverse mass and rapidity of π− mesons produced in central 40Ar+45Sc collisions at beam momenta of 13A, 19A, 30A, 40A, 75A and 150A Ge V /c. Energy and system size dependence of parameters of these distributions – mean transverse mass, the inverse slope parameter of transverse mass spectra, width of the rapidity distribution and mean multiplicity – are presented and discussed. Furthermore, the dependence of the ratio of the mean number of produced pions to the mean number of wounded nucleons on the collision energy was derived. The results are compared to predictions of several models.