proton-proton bremsstrahlung at 280 mev

Abstract

A proton-proton bremsstrahlung experiment has been carried out at TRIUMF using a 280-MeV polarized proton beam impinging on a liquid-hydrogen target. All three outgoing particles were detected: the higher-energy proton in a magnetic spectrometer, the lower-energy proton with plastic scintillators, and the photon in lead-glass Cherenkov detectors. The experiment shows the first unambiguous evidence for off-shell effects in the free nucleon-nucleon interaction, in that the analyzing powers disagree strongly with the predictions of the soft-photon approximation (which incorporates only on-shell information) but are consistent with the results of calculations using the Bonn and Paris potentials.