Compton polarimetry revisited

We compute the average polarisation asymmetry from the Klein-Nishina differential cross-section on free electrons at rest. As expected from the expression for the asymmetry, the average asymmetry is found to decrease like the inverse of the incident photon energy asymptotically at high energy. We then compute a simple estimator of the polarisation fraction that makes optimal use of all the kinematic information present in an event final state, by the use of "moments" method, and we compare its statistical power to that (la simple fit of the azimuthal distribution. In contrast to polarimetry with pair creation, for which we obtained an improvement by a factor of larger than two in a previous work, here for Compton scattering the improvement is only of 10-20%. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.