Where are pion inelastic interactions with nuclei localized?

It is shown that inelastic excitations of heavy nuclei by pions with energies in the (3, 3) resonance region occur predominantly within a 2 fm range just inside the strong absorption radius, and receive contributions from most of the main peak in the transition density. The apparent discrepancies between Mn/Mp ratios for giant resonances obtained by using pions and by using other hadronic probes cannot be ascribed to the pion excitations occurring only at very large radii.