MEASUREMENTS OF POLARIZATION TRANSFER OBSERVABLES IN (p,p') REACTIONS AT INTERMEDIATE ENERGIES

It has now been almost ten years since a charged-particle polarimeter was first coupled to a high resolution spectrometer, the HRS at Los Alamos National Laboratory, for use at intermediate energies. During this time, polarimeters of similar design and comparable performance have been built at TRIUMF and at IUCF. Yet despite this apparent potential for generating a wide variety of new data, this goal has not yet been fully realized. Despite the obvious advantages of determining, not just two, but up to eight independent parameters for a particular transition at each energy and angle, our progress in understanding these transitions has been slow. And despite some of the early claims that these types of measurements would allow for 'clean' isolation of individual terms in the nucleon-nucleon (N N) effective interaction, the waters today appear only slightly less muddy than they were ten years ago. Perhaps one of the greatest benefits derived from this early work was the optimistic fervor that prevailed for a few years in the mid 80's, when an impressive amount of theoretical effort was expended towards understanding these first results, and when experimentalists were measuring observables as rapidly as Advisory Committees would let them.