Predictions for elastic and inelastic nucleon-nucleus cross sections at high energies

Abstract

The effect of intermediate resonance production on particle-nucleus cross sections is discussed for particle energies in the energy range up to 1 TeV. It is shown that from present cosmic ray data in pp inelastic cross sections, a decrease in the total and inelastic cross sections for p-nucleus scattering of less than 10% can be expected in this energy range provided that σ pp is constant. Effects of increases in σ pp are discussed. It is shown that the decrease in the inelastic cross section is much smaller, and hence the inelastic cross section cannot be used to probe the high mass hadron spectrum.