Real and virtual Compton scattering has been and will be an important tool to study the structure of hadronic systems. We summarize the status of real Compton scattering and give an outlook at the new theoretical and experimental developments in the field of virtual Compton scattering.
The concept of Compton scattering by even-even nuclei from giant-resonance to nucleon-resonance energies and the status of experimental and theoretical researches in this field are outlined. Nuclear Compton scattering in the giant-resonance energy-region provides information on the dynamical properties of the in-medium mass of the nucleon. The electromagnetic polarizabilities of the nucleon in the nuclear medium can be extracted from nuclear Compton scattering data obtained in the quasi-deuteron energy-region. Recent results are presented for two-body effects due to the mesonic seagull amplitude and due to the excitation of nucleon internal degrees of freedom accompanied by meson exchanges. Due to these studies the in-medium electromagnetic polarizabilities are by now well understood, whereas the understanding of nuclear Compton scattering in the Delta-resonance range is only at the beginning. Phenomenological methods how to include retardation effects in the scattering amplitude are discussed and compared with model predictions.
Compton scattering on light nuclei ($A=2,3$) has emerged as an effective avenue to search for signatures of neutron polarizabilities, both spin--independent and spin--dependent ones. In this discussion I will focus on the theoretical aspect of Compton scattering on light nuclei; giving first a brief overview and therafter concentrating on our Compton scattering calculations based on Chiral effective theory at energies of the order of pion mass. These elastic $gamma$d and $gamma$He-3 calculations include nucleons, pions as the basic degrees of freedom. I will also discuss $gamma$d results where the $Delta$-isobar has been included explicitly. Our results on unpolarized and polarization observables suggest that a combination of experiments and further theoretical efforts will provide an extraction of the neutron polarizabilities.
This executive summary of recent theory progress in Compton scattering off 3He focuses on determining neutron polarisabilities; see ref. [2] and references therein for details and a better bibliography. Prepared for the Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Caen 9-13 July 2018.
We present recent results on elastic deuteron Compton scattering calculations for polarised beans and targets up to next-to-leading order within Chiral Effective Field Theory in the Small Scale Expansion variant to implement a dynamical Delta(1232) degree of freedom. A simple power-counting argument discloses that np-intermediate rescattering states must be explicitly included at leading order already. This automatically results in the correct Thomson limit and guarantees current conservation. In view of ongoing effort at MAXlab, proposals at HIGS and plans at MAMI, we address in detail single- and double-polarised observables with linearly or circularly polarised photons on both unpolarised and vector-polarised deuterons. Our results indicate that several of the polarisation observables can be instrumental to extract not only spin-independent nucleon polarisabilities, but also the so-far practically un-determined spin-dependent polarisabilities which parameterise the stiffness of the nucleon spin in external electro-magnetic fields. Amongst the questions addressed are: convergence of the expansion for including the Delta, the role of the np-rescattering contributions, and sensitivity to the deuteron wave function. An interactive Mathematica 7.0 notebook of these findings is available from the authors.
We report on a chiral effective field theory calculation of Compton scattering from the proton. Our calculation includes pions, nucleons, and the Delta(1232) as explicit degrees of freedom. It uses the delta expansion, and so implements the hierarchy of scales m_pi < M_Delta-M_N < Lambda_chi. In this expansion the power counting in the vicinity of the Delta peak changes, and resummation of the loop graphs associated with the Delta width is indicated. We have computed the nucleon Compton amplitude in the delta expansion up to N3LO for photon energies of the order of m_pi. This is the first order at which the proton Compton scattering amplitudes receive contributions from contact operators which encode contributions to the spin-independent polarisabilities from states with energies of the order of Lambda_chi. We fit the coefficients of these two operators to the experimental proton Compton data that has been taken in the relevant photon-energy domain, and are in a position to extract new results for the proton polarisabilities alpha and beta.