Results And Interpretations Of The Spin Structure Experiments At Slac PDF Download

The history of nucleon spin-structure measurements goes back to the early days of inelastic electron scattering at SLAC, when Vernon Hughes came with a proposal to accelerate polarized electrons to high energy and to study inelastic scattering from a polarized proton target. The quark model of the proton was new at the time, and the spin-dependent structure functions were an excellent testing ground for that model. The proposal developed into an experiment which became SLAC experiment E80. Subsequent experiments followed those early studies, leading to E130 at SLAC, then EMC at CERN, and a host of later experiments. In 1988 the EMC Collaboration published the first data to reach low x. The asymmetries EMC observed fell below quark model expectations, and the experimentally measured proton sum rule indicated that the spin of the quarks contributed little to the proton spin. The subject of nucleon spin-dependent structure functions was stimulated by this surprising result from EMC. The continuation of the spin-structure studies at SLAC, which have been very active in recent years, was stimulated by the successful development of high-intensity beams of polarized electrons. Table 1 lists the past, present, and planned programs and experiments that grew out of the early work. The rest of the report is divided into the following topics: polarized electrons; polarimetry; the SLAC spectrometers; radiative corrections; the proton measurements; neutron targets; the deuterium and 3He data; the g2 structure function; and the 50 GeV upgrade of the SLC.