Physics (and technique) of gas jet experiments

Recently gas jet targets have been used for the study of small momentum transfer p-p and p-d elastic and inelastic scattering. In these experiments, which were performed at Serpukhov in the USSR and at the Fermilab in the USA, the gas jet is introduced in the main ring of the accelerator. We review the techniques associated with these measurements and summarize the published results which cover 4-momentum transfers 0.001< |t|< 0.12 (GeV/c)^?2 and incident energies 8<E< 400 GeV. Elastic scattering data have yielded precise values for the slope of the nuclear scattering amplitude and for the ratio of the real to imaginary part as a function of energy. The implications of these data on the understanding of high energy hadronic interactions are discussed in some detail. We also present and discuss information on the diffractive dissociation of the proton to low mass states, obtained from inelastic scattering using the gas jet target.