Relativistic Calculations for Photonuclear Reactions (III): A Consistent Relativistic Analysis of the (e,e'p) and (gamma,p) Reactions

Relativistic calculations for the quasifree electron scattering process (e, e'p) and the direct knockout contribution to (gamma, p) reactions are presented. The spectroscopic factors determined from the former reaction are used to fix the magnitude of the knockout contribution to the (gamma, p) reaction at 60 MeV. The results obtained for several nuclei indicate that the knockout contributions are much larger in magnitude and hence closer to the data than predicted in an earlier comparison based on non-relativistic calculations. We discuss the sensitivity of the results to the choice of parameters for the binding and final state interactions. We find these uncertainties to be more pronounced at the larger missing momenta explored by the (gamma, p) reaction. The implications of the present results for the size of contributions due to meson exchange currents are discussed.