Polarization transfer in elastic electron scattering from nucleons and deuterons

We present a description, including relevant formulas and numerical estimates, of a set of polarization transfer experiments which appear to offer a feasible way to separate the deuteron charge and quadrupole form factors and measure the neutron and proton electric form factors. The experiments require a 2 to 4 GeV high-intensity, high-duty factor, longitudinally polarized electron beam and require that the polarization of the recoiling hadron be measured in a second, analyzing, scattering. The relevant asymmetries are fairly large, and our calculations show that they are sensitive to different models obtained from existing data. Attention is called to the fact that the proposed deuteron measurements will require new 10% measurements of vector and tensor analyzing powers of deuterons with kinetic energy from 150 to 450 MeV.