Impact picture for the analyzing power a N in very forward p p elastic scattering

Abstract

In the framework of the impact picture we compute the analyzing power A(N) for pp elastic scattering at high energy and in the very forward direction. We consider the full set of Coulomb amplitudes and show that the interference between the hadronic nonflip amplitude and the single-flip Coulomb amplitude is sufficient to obtain a good agreement with the present experimental data. This leads us to conclude that the single-flip hadronic amplitude is small in this low momentum transfer region and it strongly suggests that this process can be used as an absolute polarimeter at the Relativistic Heavy Ions Collider, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, working as a polarized pp collider.