Amplitude extraction in pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction: towards a situation of complete information

TL;DR

This paper discusses methods to extract reaction amplitudes in pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction using complete sets of polarization observables, highlighting the advantages of the transversity representation and analyzing current data's effectiveness.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of extracting amplitude moduli with current data and advocates for the transversity representation as advantageous for amplitude analysis.

Findings

Moduli of transversity amplitudes can be fairly accurately determined from existing data.

Double-polarization observables are less effective for phase determination.

Transversity representation offers advantages over other amplitude representations.

Abstract

A complete set for pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction is a minimum set of observables from which one can determine the underlying reaction amplitudes unambiguously. The complete sets considered in this work involve single- and double-polarization observables. It is argued that for extracting amplitudes from data, the transversity representation of the reaction amplitudes offers advantages over alternate representations. It is shown that with the available single-polarization data for the p({\gamma},K^+)\Lambda reaction, the energy and angular dependence of the moduli of the normalized transversity amplitudes in the resonance region can be determined to a fair accuracy. Determining the relative phases of the amplitudes from double-polarization observables is far less evident.