Experimental elastic angular distributions for pions and kaons in the region of laboratory momentum from 600 to 900 MeV/c over the nuclear-Coulomb interference region are analyzed to extract both the real and imaginary part of the forward meson-nucleus scattering amplitude. For pions, results for the total cross sections extracted are smaller than those found from transmission experiments. The real part of the amplitude is found to have an interesting energy dependence. The significance of this result for the behavior of hadrons in nuclei is discussed. For kaons, only qualitative results were obtained due to limited data.

• Received 2 June 1997

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.58.3500