Unitary bounds for exclusive and inclusive reactions

Many reactions are strongly constrained by the knowledge of the corresponding elastic amplitude. In some cases the bounds obtained are saturated with 25%. A new method is applied to π- diffraction. It is shown that many different experimental results are strongly constrained and related by unitarity. The integrated cross section, sigma, for a given inelastic (exclusive or inclusive) process, and the angular distribution dsigma/dt for that process can be related if the corresponding elastic amplitude is known: given sigma, an upper bound for dsigma/dt at each t is obtained; given dsigma/dt at one value of t is obtained a lower bound for sigma. In some cases the bounds are very close to the experimental data (up to about 25%). This makes the bounds useful as well as rigorous. (B.G.)