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

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 evaluation of the Coulomb phase give approximately uniform results at all energies and the differences are negligible at RHIC and LHC energies. We show that the use of the amplitude which was fitted to accommodate the nucleon data only (in the region (GeV²)), combined with the Coulomb amplitude, reproduces the existing data in the Coulomb interference domain quite accurately without any adjustment 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. Received: 3 June 2002 / Revised version: 27 February 2003 / Published online: 5 May 2003 RID="a" ID="a" e-mail: petrov@mx.ihep.su RID="b" ID="b" e-mail: predazzi@to.infn.it RID="c" ID="c" e-mail: prokudin@to.infn.it