MeV Mott Polarimetry at Jefferson Lab

In the recent past, Mott polarimetry has been employed only at low electron beam energies (~100 keV). Shortly after J. Sromicki demonstrated the first Mott scattering experiment on lead foils at 14 MeV (MAMI, 1994), a high energy Mott scattering polarimeter was developed at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (5 MeV, 1995). An instrumental precision of 0.5% was achieved due to dramatic improvement in eliminating the background signal by means of collimation, shielding, time of flight and coincidence methods. Measurements for gold targets between 0.05 μm and 5 μm for electron energies between 2 and 8 MeV are presented. A model was developed to explain the depolarization effects in the target foils due to double scattering. The instrumental helicity correlated asymmetries were measured to smaller than 0.1%. .