The slope of the hadron spin-flip amplitude and the determination of rho(s,t)

We re-examine the extraction of \rho(s,t), the ratio of the real part to the imaginary part of the scattering amplitude, and of the spin-flip amplitude, from the existing experimental data in the Coulomb-hadron interference region. We show that it is not possible to find reasonable assumptions about the structure of the scattering amplitude of proton-proton and proton-antiproton elastic scattering at high energy that would lead, in proton-antiproton scattering for 3.8 < p_L <6 GeV/c, to an agreement between data and an analysis based on dispersion relations.