The nonresonant (seagull) contribution to the nuclear Compton amplitude at low energies is strongly influenced by nucleon correlations arising from meson exchange. We study this problem in a modified Fermi gas model, where nuclear correlation functions are obtained with the help of perturbation theory. The dependence of the mesonic seagull amplitude on the nuclear radius is investigated and the influence of a realistic nuclear density on this amplitude is discussed. We found that different form factors appear for the static part (proportional to the enhancement constant $\kappa )$ of the mesonic seagull amplitude and for the parts, which contain the contribution from electromagnetic polarizabilities.

• Received 24 June 1997

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.57.305