High energy collisions between nuclei and correlations

We investigate the effects of correlations on high energy collisions between nuclei. New types of multiple scattering can occur in such collisions and their contributions to cross sections are shown to depend significantly on the presence (or absence) of short range correlations. Nucleus-nucleus collisions may, therefore, be able to probe such correlations. Calculations are performed for 12C-12C and 16O-16O elastic scattering, using correlation lengths obtained from nuclear matter calculations. The effects of short range correlations are found to be significant and, in the case of collisions between heavy nuclei, their presence prevents the higher order corrections to the optical phase shift function from taking unphysical values at small impact parameters