Spin observables and spin structure functions: inequalities and dynamics

Understand

Model-independent identities and inequalities relating the various spin observables of a reaction are reviewed in a unified formalism, together with their implications for dynamical models, their physical interpretation, and the quantum aspects of the information carried by spins, in particular entanglement.

• These constraints between observables can be obtained from the explicit expression of the observables in terms of a set of amplitudes, a non-trivial algebraic exercise which can be preceded by numerical simulation with randomly chosen amplitudes, from anticommutation relations, or from the requirement that any polarisation vector is less than unity.
• The most powerful tool is the positivity of the density matrices describing the reaction or its crossed channels, with a projection to single out correlations between two or three observables.
• For the exclusive reactions, the cases of the strangeness-exchange proton-antiproton scattering and the photoproduction of pseudoscalar mesons are treated in some detail: all triples of observables are constrained, and new results are presented for the allowed domains.