Legendre Analysis of Differential Distributions in Hadronic Reactions

Abstract

Modern experimental facilities, such as CBELSA, ELPH, JLab, MAMI and SPring-8 have provided a tremendous volume of data, often with wide energy and angular coverage, and with increasing precision. For reactions with two hadrons in the final state, these data are often presented as multiple sets of panels, with angular distributions at numerous specific energies. Such presentations have limited visual appeal, and their physical content is typically extracted through some model- dependent treatment. Instead, we explore the use of a Legendre series expansion with a relatively small number of essential coefficients. This approach has been applied in several recent experimental investigations. We present some general properties of the Legendre coefficients in the helicity framework and consider what physical information can be extracted without any model-dependent assumptions.