Evidence for Color Fluctuations in Hadrons from Coherent Nuclear Diffraction}

A QCD-based treatment of projectile size fluctuations is used to compute inelastic diffractive cross sections ${\sigma }_{diff}$ for coherent hadron-nuclear processes. We find that fluctuations near the average size give the major contribution to the cross section with $\le few\mathrm{\%}$ contribution from small size configurations. The computed values of ${\sigma }_{diff}$ are consistent with the limited available data. The importance of coherent diffraction studies for a wide range of projectiles for high energy Fermilab fixed target experiments is emphasized. The implications of these significant color fluctuations for relativistic heavy ion collisions are discussed.