Coulomb-nuclear interference in relativistic nuclear physics: proton-nucleus versus neutron-nucleus scattering

When the Dirac equation for the proton-nucleus interaction is reduced to a Schrodinger-like equation the effective non-relativistic potential which appears in the latter equation contains a Coulomb-nuclear interference term. This term can be very large if the relativistic nuclear potential contains a strong Lorentz vector component. As a consequence, a significant difference emerges between the relativistic and non-relativistic approaches regarding the way in which proton-nucleus and neutron-nucleus scattering are related.