Observation of strong reduction of multiple scattering for channeled particles in bent crystals

Strong reduction of multiple scattering for channeled particles has been observed in an experiment on the deflection of a 180 GeV/c π+-meson beam by bent silicon crystals. The RMS deflections due to multiple scattering for the channeled particles were about six times smaller than for non-channeled ones. It was shown that the approach suggested recently for the description of multiple scattering for channeled particles using the experimental data for random crystal orientations gives fair agreement with the experiment.