Dispersive Effects in Electron-Nucleus Interactions

Elastic scattering of electrons from nuclei is influenced by the possibility of virtual transitions to excited nuclear states in intermediate states. Such dispersive corrections to electron-deuteron elastic scattering are calculated in second order Born approximation for incident electron energies from 200 Mev to 500 Mev for various values of the momentum transfer. The static second-order Born formulas are also evaluated. Similar, but less accurate, calculations are carried out for ${\mathrm{He}}^4$, ${\mathrm{C}}^{12}$, and some heavier elements. These results are used to find small corrections to nuclear radii obtained from an analysis of the Stanford experiments.