A method to determine the polarization of high energy gamma-rays

Abstract

A method to determine the polarization direction of a very high energy (50 MeV - 30 GeV), linearly polarized gamma ray is analyzed and discussed. We study the differential cross section for pair production and show that the only relevant piece of information comes from the reconstruction of the pair trajectory. In particular the polarization information is coded in the azimuthal distribution of the created pair. We show that the Azimuthal Ratio (AR), defined as the ratio of produced pairs parallel to the polarization vector to pairs perpendicular to this vector, yields a very practical method to determine incoming polarization. We investigate the behavior of this function for different angular resolutions of the measuring apparatus and different energies of the incoming pairs.