Cross section

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The cross section for a given process is a measure for the rate of interactions that orininate from the given process that can be quoted independently of the experimental set up of the scattering experiment itself. See wikipedia [1].

Cross sections are measured in units of area, where the special unit barn (b) is used with prefixes. Cross sections at the LHC can range from hundreds of millibarns (the total cross section of proton-proton collisions) down to fb or smaller for rare processes that are still considered to be measurable.