We discuss basic concepts and properties of diffractive phenomena in soft hadron collisions and in deep-inelastic scattering at low Bjorken-x. The paper is not a review of the rapidly developing field but presents an attempt to show in simple terms the close inter-relationship between the dynamics of high-energy hadronic and deep-inelastic diffraction. Using the saturation model of Golec-Bierna...

We calculate the inelastic scattering cross sections to populate oneand two-phonon states in heavy ion collisions with both Coulomb and nuclear excitations. Starting from a microscopic approach based on RPA, we go beyond it in order to treat anharmonicities and non-linear terms in the exciting field. These anharmonicities and non-linearities are shown to have important effects on the cross sect...

We propose a new model for homogeneous description of hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus collisions, the Gluon Exchange Model, fundamentally based on color octet (gluon) exchange. In proton-proton collisions we provide an exact final state proton neutron spectrum including diffractive peak. proton-nucleus reactions find that projectile diquark cannot survive in more than about half multiple proto...

We propose and analyze a technique that allows one to suppress inelastic collisions and simultaneously enhance elastic interactions between cold polar molecules. The main idea is to cancel the leading dipole-dipole interaction with a suitable combination of static electric and microwave fields in such a way that the remaining van der Waals-type potential forms a three-dimensional repulsive shie...

In the absence of losses the phase of a Bose-Einstein condensate undergoes collapses and revivals in time due to elastic atomic interactions. As experiments necessarily involve inelastic collisions, we develop a model to describe the phase dynamics of the condensates in presence of collisional losses. We find that a few inelastic processes are sufficient to damp the revivals of the phase. For t...