Probing the deuteron structure at small N-N distances by cumulative pion production

Abstract

The fragmentation of deuterons into pions emitted forward in the kinematic region forbidden for free nucleon-nucleon collisions is analyzed. It is shown that the inclusion of the non-nucleonic degrees of freedom in a deuteron results in a satisfactory description of the data for the inclusive pion spectrum and improves the description of the data about $T_{20}$. According to the data, $T_{20}$ has very small positive values, less than 0.2, which contradicts the theoretical calculations ignoring these degrees of freedom.