A dirac description of nuclear polarized beam scattering: Pt. 1

The National Accelerator Centre (NAC), at Faure, will in due course install an ion source for polarized protons and deuterons. In preparation to use polarized beams in nuclear reactions, they are studying the whole polarization formalism, the meaning of the so called polarization observables and the value of various types of experiments with polarized beams. They also calculate, for NAC proton energies, the polarization observables for elastic scattering of protons on even-even nuclei in order to compare the results for a relativistic (Dirac) description of the incoming beam with those from a non-relativistic description. Here they discuss the meaning of polarization observables, using the simplest case of a spin-half polarized particle scattering by an even-even nucleus. 2 refs