Angular Distributions for Knockout and Scattering of Protons in the Eikonal Approximation

Abstract

The advent of new electron accelerators with few-GeV beam energies makes the (e,e'p) reaction a promising tool for investigating new aspects of the electromagnetic interaction. To this purpose it is crucial to set the scale of Final-State Interactions (FSI) at high ejectile energies. We have analyzed the constraints which allow for a meaningful generalization to (e,e'p) of the Glauber method used in elastic (p,p) scattering. The FSI dominance at large deflection angles produces in the distributions a universal behaviour resembling the coherent diffractive scattering between the ejected proton and the (residual) nucleus. It is argued that the comparison between (e,e'p) and (p,p), when a meaningful one, may represent a convenient tool to disentangle (exotic) effects due to FSI from those related to the (hard) electromagnetic vertex.