On the relationship between coherent excitation and quasi-elastic knock-out during the dissociation of 16O nuclei on protons.

In diffractive p + 1 6 O interactions with the subsequent decay of an excited 1 6 O nucleus into proton fragment ( p f ) and nitrogen nucleus ( 1 5 N), the kinematical characteristics of p f and 1 5 N are obtained by the parameter-free Monte Carlo simulation method. The angular, momentum, rapidity and correlation Monte Carlo characteristics for p f and 1 5 N are consistent with the distributions of the similar quantities obtained experimentally in p + 1 6 O collisions at a momentum of 3. 2 5 GeV/c per nucleon of an incident 1 6 O∗ nucleus in the rest frame of the target proton (p). The relative probabilities have been found for coherent diffraction (∼ 5 9 %) of a proton (p) on the 1 6 O nucleus as a whole, when an excited oxygen, 1 6 O∗, nucleus is formed, decaying into 1 5 N and p f (which is not necessarily the nucleon on which, in fact, the diffraction interaction has occurred), and for incoherent interaction process (∼ 4 1 %) of a proton (p) on one of the nucleons of the 1 6 O nucleus, when this nucleon is observed as a proton ( p f ) fragment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]