Nucleon nucleon diffraction

The physical importance of nucleon-nucleon diffraction and the main differences with well understood nucleon-nucleus diffraction is discussed. In the theoretical description of nucleon-nucleon diffraction in terms of the eikonal model, the hypothesis of factorization is shown to be in contradiction with the energy dependence of the impact parameter profile in proton-proton scattering at CERN-ISR. This dependence is highly non-uniform in impact parameter, giving rise to a pronounced peripheral increase with energy of the inelastic overlap function.