APPROXIMATE COULOMB DISTORTION EFFECTS IN (E,E'P) REACTIONS

In this paper we apply a well-tested approximation of electron Coulomb distortion effects to the exclusive reaction (e,e'p) in the quasielas tic region. We compare the approximate treatment of Coulomb distortion effects to the exact distorted wave Born approximation evaluated by m eans of partial wave analysis to gauge the quality of our approximate treatment. We show that the approximate Moller potential has a plane-w ave-like structure and hence permits the separation of the cross secti on into five terms which depend on bilinear products of transforms of the transition four current elements. These transforms reduce to Fouri er transforms when Coulomb distortion is not present, but become modif ied with the inclusion of Coulomb distortion. We investigate the appli cation of the approximate formalism to a model of Pb-208(e,e'p) using Dirac-Hartree single particle wave functions for the ground state and relativistic optical model wave functions for the continuum proton. We show that it is still possible to extract, albeit with some approxima tion, the various structure functions from the experimentally measured data even for heavy nuclei.