The deuteron: a mini-review

We review1 some recent results for elastic electron deuteron scattering (deuteron form factors) and photodisintegration of the deuteron, with emphasis on the recent high energy data from Jefferson Laboratory (JLab). DEUTERON WAVE FUNCTIONS AND FORM FACTORS Calculations of deuteron form factors and photo and electrodisintegration to the NN final state require a deuteron wave function. The best nonrelativistic wave functions are calculated from the Schrödinger equation using a potential adjusted to fit the NN scattering data for lab energies from 0 to 350 MeV. The quality of realistic potentials have improved steadily, and now the best potentials give fits to the NN database with a χ2/d.o.f ≃ 1. The Paris potential [2] was among the first potentials to be determined from such realistic fits, and it has since been replaced by the Argonne V18 potential (denoted by AV18) [3], the Nijmegen potentials [4], and most recently by the CD Bonn potentials [5, 6]. The momentum space S and D state wave functions determined from three of these models and two relativistic models (Model IIB [7] and Model W16, one of a family of models with varying amounts of off-shell sigma coupling introduced in connection with relativistic calculations of the triton binding energy described in Ref. [8]) are shown in Fig. 1. The figure shows that the S and D-state components of all of these models are almost identical (i.e.variations of less than 10%) for momenta below about 400 MeV, and vary by less than a factor of 2 as the momenta reaches 1 GeV. Elastic electron–deuteron scattering is described in the one-photon exchange approximation by three deuteron form factors [9, 10, 11]. In its most general form, the relativistic deuteron current can be written [9, 12] − 〈 d′|Jμ|d 〉 = { G1(Q 2) [ξ′∗ ·ξ]−G3(Q) (ξ′∗ ·q)(ξ ·q) 2md } (dμ +d′μ) +GM(Q 2) [ξμ(ξ′∗ ·q)−ξ′∗μ(ξ ·q)] , (1) where ξ,d (ξ′,d′) are the polarization and momentum vectors of the incoming (outgoing) 1 This talk is a shorter version of a review being prepared for Journal of Physics G [1]. 1 0 4 1 0 3 1 0 2 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 200 400 600 80