Recent Advances in Compton Scattering *

There are so many excellent review papers describing the principles of C o m p t o n spectrometry that they may be considered almost as a bible for anyone wishing to work in this field. Here I want to quote the book edited by Williams [1], papers by Coope r [2 -4 ] and more recent papers of Mann inen [5] and Sharma [6]. The use of circularly polarized synchrot ron radiat ion to so-called magnet ic C o m p t o n scattering studies was reviewed this year by Sakai et al. [7]. In this review, recent achievements of the experimental technique are summarized and a few interesting problems in physics that have been studied recently by the C o m p t o n scattering technique are pointed out. We shall be mainly interested in studies carried out in the last three years that elapsed since the Sagamore IX meeting. Obviously, a choice of material is very subjective and does not pretend to exhaust all the problems studied. F o r example, we shall not deal at all with the applied research that can be carried out with the use of C o m p t o n scattering, in spite of the fact that such problems occupy people's minds (see, e.g. [8, 9]) and that their impor tance cannot be questioned.