Polarization effects and gamma transport

The nature of the scattering interactions in the x- and γ-ray energy regime makes the effect of the polarization extremely important, mainly, when the incident beam is partially or totally polarized. The effect of the three states of source polarization that can be used in γ-ray spectrometry, unpolarized, linearly polarized and circularly polarized, on the x-ray spectrum are analyzed separately stressing the points of interest in each case.