Elastic scattering and the problem of transparent nucleon

Two regions of momentum transfer in the differential cross section data on high-energy elastic hadron scattering are of great physical interest: the region of the diffraction minimum where the diffractive structure appears, and nearly forward scattering where the collisions mostly take place due to Coulomb scattering. Since there is no reliable theory for high energy diffractive scattering there are attempts to describe and eventually to correlate the differential cross sections at these two regions in a phenomenological way. Various recently published approaches are discussed including those based on the geometrical scaling equations, the West and Yennie form of the total scattering amplitude, etc. (Z.S.) 12 refs