Amplitude extraction in pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction: towards a situation of complete information

A complete set for pseudoscalar-meson photoproduction is a minimum set of observables from which one can determine the underlying reaction amplitudes unambiguously. The complete sets considered in this work involve single- and double-polarization observables. It is argued that for extracting amplitudes from data, the transversity representation of the reaction amplitudes offers advantages over alternate representations. It is shown that with the available single-polarization data for the p(γ,K+)Λ reaction, the energy and angular dependence of the moduli of the normalized transversity amplitudes in the resonance region can be determined to a fair accuracy. Determining the relative phases of the amplitudes from double-polarization observables is far less evident