Cul-De-Sac of the Spatial Image of Proton Interactions

Abstract The unitarity condition in the impact parameter space is used to obtain some information about the shape of the interaction region of colliding protons. It is shown that, strictly speaking, a reliable conclusion can be gained only if the behavior of the elastic scattering amplitude (especially, its imaginary part) at all transferred momenta is known. This information is currently impossible to obtain from experimentation. In practice, several assumptions and models are used. They lead to different results as shown below. View Full-Tex