Polarization Transfer in Hard X-Ray Elastic Scattering on Gold Atoms for Non-Zero Azimuthal Scattering Angles – First ResultsONLINE ONLY

Elastic scattering of hard x-rays by atoms is a fundamental photon-matter interaction where the energy of the incident and the outgoing photon are the same. For photon energies of up to several hundred keV elastic scattering is dominated by so-called Rayleigh scattering being the scattering of the x-rays from bound electrons. Fully relativistic calculations predict that the polarization characteristics of the scattered beam are highly sensitive on the polarization of the incident beam and the scattering geometry. This behavior was analyzed during a beam time at beamline P07 of the synchrotron facility PETRA III of DESY, Hamburg where highly linearly polarized x-rays with a photon energy of 175 keV were scattered on a thin gold target. Using a prototype 2D-sensitive silicon strip detector dedicated as Compton polarimeter that was developed for the SPARC collaboration we were able to analyze the polarization characteristics of the scattered beam both within and out of the polarization plane of the incident photon beam. While the data analysis is still ongoing first results already show a depolarization of the scattered bam and a rotation of the polarization vector to the scattering plane for scattering out of the polarization plane of the incident beam.