Application of Austern--Blair theory to the interference between Coulomb and nuclear excitation in the inelastic scattering of heavy ions

The connection between elastic and inelastic scattering of heavy ions in the combined Coulomb and nuclear fields is discussed in terms of the Austern-Blair theory. It is shown that the first order distorted-wave Born-approximation inelastic scattering amplitudes may be obtained from the elastic scattering amplitudes to a good degree of accuracy. Consequently they contain essentially the same information about the nuclear potentials as the elastic scattering S-matrix elements