Information Content of Polarization Measurements

Abstract

Information entropy is applied to the state of knowledge of reaction amplitudes in pseudoscalar meson photoproduction, and a scheme is developed that quantifies the information content of a measured set of polarization observables. It is shown that this definition of information is a more practical measure of the quality of a set of measured observables than whether the combination is a mathematically complete set. It is also shown that when experimental uncertainty is introduced, complete sets of measurements do not necessarily remove ambiguities, and that experiments should strive to measure as many observables as practical in order to extract amplitudes.

19 pages, 4 figures; figures updated, minor textual corrections

References in corpus (3)

• Completeness Rules for Spin Observables in Pseudoscalar Meson Photoproduction
• Spin observables and spin structure functions: inequalities and dynamics
• Positivity Constraints on Spin Observables in Exclusive Pseudoscalar Meson Photoproduction

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Photoproduction of $\Lambda$ and ${\Sigma }^0$ hyperons using linearly polarized photons
• Light Baryon Spectroscopy
• Photoproduction Reactions and Non-Strange Baryon Spectroscopy
• The impact of ${\mathbf{K}}^{+}\mathbf{\Lambda }$ photoproduction on the resonance spectrum
• Bayesian inference of the resonance content of p(gamma,K^+)Lambda
• The complete experiment for photoproduction of pseudoscalar mesons in a truncated partial wave analysis
• Photon beam asymmetry $\Sigma$ for $\eta$ and ${\eta }^{\prime }$ photoproduction from the proton
• Strong evidence for nucleon resonances near 1900\,MeV
• Light baryon resonances from a coupled-channel study including $\mathbf{K\Sigma }$ photoproduction
• The incompleteness of complete pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction
• Amplitude extraction in pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction: towards a situation of complete information
• Polarization observables in the longitudinal basis for pseudo-scalar meson photoproduction using a density matrix approach
• Model discrimination in pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction
• Moravcsik's theorem on complete sets of polarization observables reexamined
• Minimal complete sets for two pseudoscalar meson photoproduction
• The complete experiment problem of pseudoscalar meson photoproduction in a truncated partial wave analysis
• Amplitude- and truncated partial-wave analyses combined: A novel, almost theory-independent single-channel method for extracting photoproduction multipoles directly from measured data
• Exploring Nucleon Structure with the Self-Organizing Maps Algorithm
• New graphical criterion for the selection of complete sets of polarization observables and its application to single-meson photoproduction as well as electroproduction