HARP: a hadron production experiment

Hadron production is a key ingredient in many aspects of neutrino physics. Precise prediction of atmospheric neutrino fluxes, characterization of accelerator neutrino beams, quantification of pion production and capture for neutrino factory designs, all of these would profit of highstatistics, high-precision hadron production measurements. In addition, such data is needed for the calibration of Monte-Carlo hadron production models. The HARP experiment at CERN is performing extensive measurements of cross sections and secondary particle yields to address these problems.