Coulomb distortion in high-Q^2 elastic e-p scattering

Abstract

Recently, there has been a significant amount of activity to try and understand the discrepancy between Rosenbluth and polarization transfer measurements of the proton form factors. It has been suggested that the standard use of plane-wave Born approximation in extracting the form factors is insufficient, and that higher-order terms must also be included. Of the corrections missing in standard prescriptions, Coulomb distortion is the most well understood. In this paper, we examine the effect of Coulomb distortion on the extraction of the proton form factors.