Bremsstrahlung: an experimentalist’s personal perspective on the postmodern era

Abstract

In this brief review I will discuss the recent experimental work on the doubly differential cross section, i.e. the photon energy and angular distribution, for electron bremsstrahlung from thin solid film and gas targets. Since the beginning of the modern era in the study of bremsstrahlung with the publication of the 1971 paper by Tseng and Pratt, Professor Pratt has been the dominant influence in bremsstrahlung research. Most, if not all, experimental research during the modern era has been motivated by the interest in comparing data with the theory of Pratt and his coworkers. As bremsstrahlung research has moved into its postmodern era, new experiments with increasing precision are concentrating on determining under what conditions ordinary bremsstrahlung theory needs to be supplemented by a contribution from polarization bremsstrahlung. Efforts to improve the comparison of thin-target experiment with theory have also led to new experimental and modeling work on bremsstrahlung from thick solid targets. Thick-target bremsstrahlung is interesting in its own right, but we also want to understand it better since it is the ever-present background in the thin-target experiments and the limiting factor in the effort to distinguish the polarization contribution to the total bremsstrahlung spectrum. Professor Pratt ushered in the modern era in bremsstrahlung research and has recently guided the transition into the postmodern era. It can be expected that he will continue to have a formative influence on the developments of bremsstrahlung research into the foreseeable future.