New experimental method for investigation of the nucleon polarizabilities

At the continuous wave (cw) Superconducting Darmstadt Electron Linear Accelerator S-DALINAC, a new method has been developed for the determination of the electric ( α ¯ ) and magnetic ( β ¯ ) polarizabilities of the proton and the deuteron. For that purpose the energy and angular dependence of the differential cross-section for elastic γ p and γ d scattering of bremsstrahlung photons in the energy range between 20 and 100 MeV is measured by detecting the recoiling proton (deuteron) in coincidence with the scattered bremsstrahlung photon. α ¯ and β ¯ are then found by means of a best fit to a theoretical description of the scattering cross-section with these quantities as open parameters. The experimental setup consists of a bremsstrahlung photon facility, two specially designed high pressure hydrogen (deuterium) ionization chambers which serve as targets and detectors of the recoil proton (deuteron), NaI gamma spectrometers and several additional detectors for beam diagnostics and normalization. The whole setup was tested using bremsstrahlung photon beams with endpoint energies of 60 and 79.3 MeV. The results of the test experiments show that future high-statistics measurements are feasible.