MULTIPLE SCATTERING THEORY FOR INELASTIC PROCESSES

Abstract

The review is devoted to the description of inelastic interactions of composite systems in the framework of the multiple scattering approach. Quasielastic scattering and multiple hadron production processes are considered for hadron-hadron, hadron-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies. We show that important information on inelastic processes follows on very general grounds from the classification of various intermediate states in the elastic amplitude, as similarly AGK cutting rules arise for reggeon diagrams. Attention is mainly given to the appropriate technique, which is illustrated with several examples of increasing complexity. The general formalism for the inelastic screening corrections is presented and its particular applications to various reactions. The review does not aim at the systematic study of numerous versions of the multiple scattering calculus confronting each other and to the extensive experimental data. Instead, we concentrate on a few simple examples to make clear the underlying physics and to work out the needed machinery employed in practical calculations.