Performance of a polarized deuterium internal target in a medium-energy electron storage ring

A polarized deuterium target internal to a medium-energy electron storage ring is described in the context of spindependent (e, e′d) and (e ,e′p) experiments. Tensor polarized deuterium was produced in an atomic beam source and injected into a storage cell target. A Breit-Rabi polarimeter was used to monitor the injected atomic beam polarization. An electrostatic ion-extraction system and a Wien filter were utilized to measure on-line the atomic fraction of the target gas (71 ± 2%) in the storage cell. A target thickness t ≃ 2 × 10^{13 2}H/cm² was achieved. The target tensor polarization was varied from P^+zz = 0.49(3) to P^-_zz = -0.89(6) while keeping the vector polarization P_z at zero. The luminosity was ∼ 2 × 10³¹ e^- · ²H · cm^-2s^-1 at a beam current of 120 mA. The performance was stable over a five-week running period. A large acceptance non-magnetic detector system was used for the electron-proton (deuteron) coincidence measurement. It is demonstrated that these techniques result in low backgrounds due to scattering from species other than the polarized target gas and allow for fast and flexible orientation of the target spin. Specific issues such as interfacing the experiment to the storage ring and monitoring the performance of the target system are discussed in detail.