One-photon-exchange contribution to inelastic hadronic collisions

We calculate the contribution of one-photon exchange to pp and πp inelastic cross sections at high energies. We show that these are of increasing importance at higher energies. In particular, the interference of this amplitude with the purely strong amplitude can contribute about a millibarn to σ(ab) - σ(a̅b) at Serpukhov energies. This may well explain the observed difference between σ(π<SUP>−</SUP>p) and σ(π<SUP>+</SUP>p)