Inclusive pion production by pions on nuclei and determination of root-mean-square radii of proton and neutron distributions

A brief nonanalytic survey of data available in the literature for parameters that characterize nuclear sizes is given, and the potentials of some methods for determining these sizes are compared. Attention is given primarily to determining nuclear sizes in experiments that study pion-nucleus interaction. For pointlike protons and neutrons, values of parameters that describe the radial dependences of their densities according to the Fermi distribution are presented in a tabular form. The method proposed previously at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP, Moscow) for determining nuclear sizes on the basis of measuring differential cross sections for π∓ + A → πforw± + X processes in the kinematical region where the recorded interaction event occurs on a single proton (neutron) of nucleus A, the presence of the remaining nucleons manifesting itself in shadowing effects, is described, and examples of the application of this method are given.