Talk:Sherman function

Observations and suggestions for improvements
The following observations and suggestions for improvements were collected, following expert review of the article within the Science, Tecnology, Society and Wikipedia course at the Politecnico di Milano, in June 2020.

The article contains a seriously wrong statement, namely that the spin-orbit coupling depends on the interaction between the electron spin and the magnetic field produced *by the nuclei*. The nuclear magnetic moment has nothing to do with it. If this was the case, different isotopes of the same element would have different spin-orbit couplings and, therefore, different Sherman functions. Instead, the magnetic field interacting with the spin of the incoming electron arises from orbital angular momentum of the electrons.

There is a problem with ref.[5] (Mermin-Ashcroft). The ""page number"" (p. 848) should be used to indicate the location of an equation/statement within the book. Instead, here it is used to indicate the total number of pages in the book. As a side note, I think that a book on atomic physics would have been more appropriate than one on solid-state physics, on this particular topic.

If possible, I suggest to include representative plot(s) of S(theta) (for a given element), order to given a feeling for what this function looks like. The Sherman function also depends on the energy of the incoming electron (beta=v/c in the original publication), but this is left somewhat implicit in the article.

The section ""Measure"" should be renamed to ""Measurement"". Or, better, ""Application"". The reason is that this section deals with the application of the Sherman function to measure the polarization of an electron beam, not with the measurement of the Sherman function itself. The previous section mentions that ""Theoretical calculations [of the Sherman function] are available for different atomic targets"". Next, the article says that the Sherman function may be ""...known from previous calibrations"", which I assume involve experimental measurements. This leaves the reader somewhat confused.

Minor points, on English language. In the first sentence, I do not like the usage of ""mathematical tool"" to describe a function. In the second sentence, I object to the use of ""calculate"" to describe an experimental measurement. I suggest to rearrange these as follows: ""The Sherman function describes the dependence of electron-atom scattering events on the spin of the scattered electrons. It was first evaluated theoretically the physicist Noah Sherman and it allows the measurement of polarization of an electron beam by Mott scattering experiments.""

Additional note. The Italian version of the article is ""orphan"" (there are no links to it): Funzione di Sherman". Gmrozz (talk) 10:24, 15 July 2020 (UTC)