Relation between the Damping of Large Transverse Momenta in Elastic and Inelastic Collisions from Unitarity

Abstract

It is shown from the unitarity relation that the damping of large transverse momenta in inelastic collisions necessarily implies their damping in elastic collisions. In this derivation it is assumed that an inelastic amplitude can be written as a product of a slowly varying factor which depends only on incident energy and the longitudinal components ${q_i}^L$ of the momenta $q_i$ and another factor which incorporates the exponential damping of transverse momenta.