| Abstract: | A key assumption in the derivation of the optical potential for high energy hadron-nucleus scattering is that no target nucleon is struck more than once. The local field (rescattering) amplitude gives the probability for the projectile to strike a target nucleon twice with an intermediate interaction with another nucleon. This rescattering amplitude generates a correction to the basic high energy optical potential, and it must be small for the above assumption to be valid. We evaluate the local field correction to the optical potential using the formalism of Foldy and Walecka. The projectile-nucleon potential is assumed to have a finite range, and the target nucleons are kept sufficiently far apart by a hard core correlation function that there is no overlap between target particles, and all off-energy-shell effects vanish. With a specific form for the high energy behavior of the on-shell projectile-nucleon scattering amplitude, we find that the local field correction vanishes rapidly at high energy. |
