Evidence for color fluctuations in hadrons from coherent nuclear diffraction.

A QCD-based treatment of projectile size fluctuations is used to compute inelastic diffractive cross sections σdiff for coherent hadron-nuclear processes. We find that fluctuations near the average size give the major contribution to the cross section with ≤ few% contribution from small size configurations. The computed values of σdiff are consistent with the limited available data. The importance of coherent diffraction studies for a wide range of projectiles for high energy Fermilab fixed target experiments is emphasized. The implications of these significant color fluctuations for relativistic heavy ion collisions are discussed.