Abstract:
A model-independent irreducible tensor formalism is developed to discuss photon polarization in np fusion. It is shown that photon polarization arising out of the interference of the dominant isovector M1 amplitude at thermal neutron energies with the small isoscalar M1 and E2 amplitudes can be studied with advantage in suitably designed polarized beam and polarized target experiments, where the neutron and proton polarizations are either opposite to each other or orthogonal to each other