Influence of the Mott-Schwinger interaction on the elastic scattering of protons

It is demonstrated that the Mott-Schwinger interaction must be taken into account when analyses of polarisation measurements in proton scattering at energies below the Coulomb barrier are to be performed with high accuracy. A treatment of the effect is worked out in perturbation theory, and the reliability of the method is demonstrated. It is shown how the resulting badly converging series for the “Mott-Schwinger amplitude” can conveniently be summed by means of Padé-approximation. Numerical results are presented for several representative cases.