Systematic study of Coulomb distortion effects in exclusive (e,e'p) reactions

A technique to deal with Coulomb electron distortions in the analysis of (e,e{sup {prime}}p) reactions is presented. Thereby, no approximations are made. The suggested technique relies on a partial-wave expansion of the electron wave functions and a multipole decomposition of the electron and nuclear current in momentum space. In that way, we succeed in keeping the computational times within reasonable limits. This theoretical framework is used to calculate the quasielastic (e,e{sup {prime}}p) reduced cross sections for proton knockout from the valence shells in {sup 16}O, {sup 40}Ca, {sup 90}Zr, and {sup 208}Pb. The final-state interaction of the ejected proton with the residual nucleus is treated within an optical potential model. The role of electron distortion on the extracted spectroscopic factors is discussed. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}