Mott scattering as a probe of long range QCD effects

We investigate the possibility of using the Mott scattering between identical nuclei to assess the existence of long range QCD effects, e.g., a color van der Waals interaction, as suggested recently. We show that the inclusion of atomic effects is very important and should be considered in order to extract limits on the strength of the color van der Waals force. We compare our calculations with the analysis of a recent heavy ion experiment.