The Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule at MAMI

An extended experimental program to investigate the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn (GDH) sum rule and related partial reaction cross sections on proton and neutron has been carried out by the GDH collaboration at the electron accelerators MAMI (Mainz) and ELSA (Bonn). The GDH sum rule connects the helicity-dependent photoabsorption cross section with the anomalous magnetic moment of the nucleon. The GDH collaboration has measured the total cross section of circularly polarised photons with longitudinally polarised protons at MAMI and ELSA to check this sum rule experimentally. In addition partial reaction channels like pion, double pion and eta production were determined. This provides new information on the helicity-dependent excitation spectrum of the nucleon. With the help of partial wave analyses it is possible to extract new, complementary information on the broad, overlapping resonances in this energy region. The double polarisation observable E measured in this experiment enhances the smaller multipoles via interference terms. The analysis of our data provides a new possibility to study the photon couplings to the nucleon resonances, especially above the Δ resonance where many properties of the observed states (e.g., coupling constants, branching ratios, helicity amplitudes) are only poorly known. In this paper we present several new results from our measurements on polarised proton and deuteron targets. (orig.)