A precision measurement of the longitudinal polarization of betas following P32 decay

A Mott polarimeter operating at MeV electron beam energies

We have developed a Mott electron polarimeter for the Mainzer microtron (MAMI) accelerator in Mainz, Germany. At beam energies ranging between 1.0 and 3.5 MeV two double focusing magnet spectrometers collect elastically backscattered electrons from gold targets. In spite of the small spectrometer acceptance, a sufficient statistical efficiency is achieved to provide very fast measurements if beam currents typical for experiments at MAMI are being used. High reproducibility is achieved, demonstrating that the results of asymmetry measurements are independent of the primary beam current in a range from 0.004 to 45 μA at a level of <1% relative variation. Compared to low energy polarimeters of similar construction an improvement of a factor 2-3 in absolute accuracy seems possible.