A theoretical description of nucleon knockout reactions initiated by polarized electron scattering from polarized nuclei is presented. Explicit expressions for the complete set of reduced response functions (independent of the polarization angle) that can be experimentally obtained assuming plane waves for the electron are given in a general multipole expansion. The formalism is applied to the particular case of closed-shell-minus-one nuclei using two models for the ejected nucleon, including the final-state interaction phenomenologically with a complex optical potential and in the factorized plane-wave impulse approximation. Relativistic effects in the kinematics and in the electromagnetic current are incorporated throughout specifically a new expansion of the electromagnetic current in powers only of the struck nucleon momentum is employed. Results are presented for the nucleus 39 K. 1998 Academic Press
1. Introduction
The completely unpolarized quasi-free (e, e$p) reaction has been systematically used to probe single-particle properties in complex nuclei, such as momentum distributions and spectroscopic factors , and the reliability of the spectroscopic information deduced from these data is based on the weak dependence of the extracted momentum distributions upon the electron scattering kinematical Article No. PH975749 56 0003-4916ร98 25.00