Physical Review Letters, vol.105, no.2, 2010 (SCI-Expanded)
Charged-hadron transverse-momentum and pseudorapidity distributions in proton-proton collisions at √s=7TeV are measured with the inner tracking system of the CMS detector at the LHC. The charged-hadron yield is obtained by counting the number of reconstructed hits, hit pairs, and fully reconstructed charged-particle tracks. The combination of the three methods gives a charged-particle multiplicity per unit of pseudorapidity dNch/ dη|η|<0.5 = 5.78 ± 0.01(stat)±0.23(syst) for non-single-diffractive events, higher than predicted by commonly used models. The relative increase in charged-particle multiplicity from √s=0.9 to 7 TeV is [66.1±1.0(stat)±4.2(syst)]%. The mean transverse momentum is measured to be 0.545±0.005(stat)±0.015(syst)GeV/c. The results are compared with similar measurements at lower energies. © 2010 The American Physical Society.