Coulomb effects in hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions and the hadron-neutron amplitude

Abstract

Coulomb effects in high energy charged hadron-nucleus collisions are studied in a formalism which is exact within the framework of multiple diffraction theory and takes into account the extended charge effects of the incident hadron and the bound protons. Several more approximate but simpler formulas are also considered and their accuracy discussed. Results are extended to include heavy-ion collisions in the optical limit of the Glauber theory and in the Chou-Yang model. Applications are made to the proton-deuteron elastic and elastic plus quasielastic scattering measurements below 70 GeV to extract the ratio of real to imaginary part and the slope parameter of the proton-neutron elastic scattering amplitude. The results are compared with those from dispersion relation calculations and from earlier analyses. Approximate analytic formulas derived for $p-d$ scattering give results almost identical to the more exact expressions. For nucleus-nucleus collisions the Coulomb effects are found to be important over a rather wide range of momentum transfers.