CALT-68-1148 DOE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT

An Experimenter’s Guide to the Helicity Formalism

Jeffrey D. Richman California Institute of Techology

Pasadena, California 91125

ABSTRACT

The helicity formalism is developed in detail and used to obtain final state angular distributions in relativistic scattering and decay processes. The topics covered include properties of rotation operators, construction of helicity states, scattering and decay amplitudes, the parity of helicity states, and the treatment of identical particles. June, 1984

________ Work supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC03-81-ER40050.