Nuclear Coherent versus Incoherent Effects in Peripheral RHI Collisions

Abstract

We derive simple and physically transparent expressions for the contribution of the strong interaction to one nucleon removal processes in peripheral relativistic heavy ion collisions. The coherent contribution,i.e, the excitation of a giant dipole resonance via meson exchange is shown to be negligible as well as interference between coulomb and nuclear excitation. Incoherent nucleon knock out contribution is also derived suggesting the nature of the nuclear interaction in this class of processes. We also justify the simple formulae used to fit the data of the E814 Collaboration.