Coherent Coulomb excitation of relativistic nuclei in aligned crystal targets

Coherent Coulomb excitation of ultrarelativistic nuclei passing through an aligned target is studied. Multiple scattering theory description of this process which incorporates both the resonant properties of particle-crystal interactions and the shadowing effect typical of the diffractive scattering is developed. It is found that at small transverse momenta qtr the shadowing effect drastically changes the dependence of coherent amplitudes on the crystal thickness L from. At relatively large qtr this effect is not found