Polarized Heavy Ions

Abstract

In the past the use of polarized heavy ions has been only a problem of academic interest to the heavy ion physics community. There are theoretical and practical reasons for this: the serious difficulty that in the present state of heavy ion physics, for which our understanding of the phenomena is sometimes crude and incomplete, the use of polarized heavy ions, which often have spin 3/2 and larger, would complicate the interpretation of experiments. This argument is accompanied by the belief that sources for polarized heavy ions which can be used on tandem accelerators are complicated, that the large variety of beams which are necessary for a reasonable investigation of reactions with polarized heavy ions can probably not all be produced in just a few type of sources, that polarization standards for all these ions and because of the large spins, for all the tensor moments must be found which looks like an unsolvable problem. Additionally there was and is the horror that the polarization physicists want more or less stupidly to repeat the experiments which up to now have been done unpolarized, if possible, with a polarized beam.