Coulomb interference in high-energy pp and $\bar p p$ scattering

Abstract

An analysis of the Coulombic amplitude and its interference with the nuclear amplitude which is driven by the three-component Pomeron is presented. It is shown that different approaches towards the Coulomb phase evaluation give approximately uniform result at all energies and the difference is negligible at RHIC and LHC energies. We show that the use of the amplitude which was fitted to accomodate nucleon data only (in the region 0.01 < |t| < 14.5 (GeV^2)) combined with the Coulomb amplitude, reproduces the existing data in the Coulomb interference domain quite accurately without any adjustement of the parameters. As a consequence, we predict the differential cross section in the region of the Coulomb nucleon interference for both RHIC and LHC energies.