Abstract
The interference between scattered and unscattered elastic waves in beam-beam scattering is investigated in the small-angle limit. It is shown that the scattered intensity averaged over the scattering volume leads to a diminution of the forward scattering proportional to the total scattering cross section or imaginary part of the elastic scattered amplitude with angular dependence determined by the shape of the projectile and target-beam-intensity distributions. This effect cannot explain earlier observations of forward scattering enhancement observed by Geiger and Morón-León [Phys. Rev. Lett. 42, 1336 (1979)].