A theoretical study is made of the advantages to be gained in polarizing a deuteron target by applying an external electric quadrupole field with non-zero asymmetry parameter for carrying outd(π, π)d experiments, in order to determine empirically the helicity amplitudes A, B, C, D characterizing the scattering, without any phase ambiguities.

The Stokes parameters characterising the polarization of the photon in theγ-decay of¹²C*(1⁺) are examined in correlation with the scattered proton in¹²C(p,p′)¹²C*(1⁺). This opens up the possibility of efficiently determining empirically the six inelastic scattering amplitudes utilizing only 13 measurements. We identify several alternative sets of such measurements to encourage experimental efforts in this direction.