Bremsstrahlung in Electron-Proton Scattering

Abstract

Measurements were made of the differential cross section for high-energy electron-proton scattering accompanied by either the emission of photons of various energies or low-energy pions. The dominant process studied was scattering of electrons accompanied by the emission of a single hard photon. The experiment was carried out by observing the spectrum of the inelastically scattered electron without observation of the recoil proton or emitted photon. The differential cross section for this process was computed theoretically by the numerical integration of a formula previously obtained by Berg and Lindner. The result of the integration yielded an approximate formula which expresses the cross section in terms of an "equivalent radiator." This formula was checked against both the more accurate computation and the experiment and found to be in good agreement. The theoretical expression for inelastic electron scattering is given in terms of the experimental measurements of elastic electron-proton scattering. The check of experiment against theory could be made insensitive to both the values of the elastic electron-proton cross sections assumed and to the absolute acceptance of the magnetic spectrometer used in the experiment by normalizing the observations to measurements of elastic electron-proton scattering.