Polarization phenomena in hyperon-nucleon scattering

Abstract

We investigate polarization observables in hyperon-nucleon scattering by decomposing scattering amplitudes into spin-space tensors, where each component describes scattering by corresponding spin-dependent interactions, so that contributions of the interactions in the observables are individually identified. In this way, for elastic scattering we find some linear combinations of the observables sensitive to particular spin-dependent interactions such as symmetric spin-orbit (LS) interactions and antisymmetric LS ones. These will be useful to criticize theoretical predictions of the interactions when the relevant observables are measured. We treat vector analyzing powers, depolarizations, and coefficients of polarization transfers and spin correlations, a part of which is numerically examined in $\Sigma^{+} p$ scattering as an example. Total cross sections are studied for polarized beams and targets as well as for unpolarized ones to investigate spin dependence of imaginary parts of forward scattering amplitudes.