Radiative corrections to elastic electron-carbon scattering cross sections in comparison with experiment

The influence of dispersion on the differential scattering cross section in the vicinity of the first diffraction minimum is revisited for collision energies between 200 and 450 MeV. Transient nuclear excitations in the giant resonance region with angular momentum L \leq 3 are taken into consideration within updated numerics. Moreover, the deviations of the nonperturbative QED corrections from the conventionally used smooth Born predictions are accounted for. A qualitative agreement with the measurements is only obtained for the lowest energy, while dispersion within the present model is too small at the higher energies.