Effects of vacuum polarization in hadron-hadron scattering.

To investigate the effect of vacuum polarization in the Coulomb interaction between hadrons, the relative differential cross section for elastic /sup 12/C-/sup 12/C scattering at E/sub lab/ = 4 MeV has been measured with high precision. The data are compared to theoretical calculations that take into account the contribution of the U-dieresishling potential and other small contributions. Data and calculation agree within 1.5 standard deviations. This constitutes a test of the vacuum polarization on the 7% level.