Coulomb Distortion Effects for (e,e'p) Reactions at High Electron Energy

Abstract

We report a significant improvement of an approximate method of including electron Coulomb distortion in electron induced reactions at momentum transfers greater than the inverse of the size of the target nucleus. In particular, we have found a new parametrization for the elastic electron scattering phase shifts that works well at all electron energies greater than 300 $MeV$. As an illustration, we apply the improved approximation to the $(e,e'p)$ reaction from medium and heavy nuclei. We use a relativistic ``single particle'' model for $(e,e'p)$ as as applied to $^{208}Pb(e,e'p)$ and to recently measured data at CEBAF on $^{16}O(e,e'p)$ to investigate Coulomb distortion effects while examining the physics of the reaction.