The Determination of Pseudoscalar Meson Photoproduction Amplitudes from Complete Experiments

A new generation of complete experiments is currently underway with the goal of performing a high precision extraction of pseudoscalar meson photo-production amplitudes. Here we review the most general analytic form of the cross section, dependent upon the three polarization vectors of the beam, target and recoil baryon, including all single, double and triple-polarization terms involving 16 spin-dependent observables. Analytic expressions that determine the recoil baryon polarization are also presented. Different conventions are in use in the literature and we have used a numerical calculation of cross sections from Chew-Goldberger-Low-Nambu amplitudes with arbitrary spin projections to clarify apparent sign differences. As an illustration of the use of this machinery, we carry out a multipole analysis of the γp → K+Λ reaction and examine the impact of recently published polarization measurements. In fitting multipoles, we use a combined Monte Carlo sampling of the amplitude space, with gradient minimization, and find a shallow χ2 valley pitted with a very large number of local minima, despite the inclusion of recent data on 8 different observables. We conclude that, while a mathematical solution to the problem of determining an amplitude free of ambiguities may require 8 observables, as has been pointed out in the literature, experiments with realistically achievable uncertainties will require a significantly larger number.