Analyzing the Effects of Neutron Polarizabilities in Elastic Compton Scattering off ${}^3$He


Abstract in English

Motivated by the fact that a polarized ${}^3$He nucleus behaves as an `effective neutron target, we examine manifestations of neutron electromagnetic polarizabilities in elastic Compton scattering from the Helium-3 nucleus. We calculate both unpolarized and double-polarization observables using chiral perturbation theory to next-to-leading order (${mathcal O}(e^2 Q)$) at energies, $omega leq m_{pi}$, where $m_{pi}$ is the pion mass. Our results show that the unpolarized differential cross section can be used to measure neutron electric and magnetic polarizabilities, while two double-polarization observables are sensitive to different linear combinations of the four neutron spin polarizabilities. [Note added in 2018] The qualitative conclusions and analytic formulae presented in this paper are correct, but several of the numerical results are wrong: see the erratum posted as arXiv:1804.01206 for further details. A full suite of corrected numerical results for cross sections and asymmetries can be found in Margaryan et al., arXiv:1804.00956. They can also be obtained as an interactive Mathematica notebook by emailing hgrie@gwu.edu.

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