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.